Boundaries of Kanban

Markus Andrezak is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013) about Boundaries of Kanban - Disruptive Innovation. An overview of Markus’s talk sums up our conversation in the podcast quite well.

Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference: Kanban is fantastic in the support the flow of product development and self improvement of teams in that area. However, at each time the process defined through Kanban poses an impediment to work in the creative field. While Kanban may very well fit to work in the domains of product maintenance and iterative, feature by feature innovation, it does not support evolutionary or disruptive innovation. These types of innovation dip slightly or even more into chaos and are completely non linear processes which simply do not fit the Kanban board and process. The talk will show how to protect innovation from delivery and how to create the necessary level of communication between these areas w/o creating silos.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: I've struggled when I’ve applied Kanban to sales and marketing because it is similar thinking, it is very non-linear. The way I view it is that it's not this linear progression as much as it’s an iterative circle within a certain column. That group could be always there until they come out of the loop somewhere. They could either go backwards or forward. Is that similar type thinking to what you have done or do you have a better way?

Markus: I think it's very interesting what you said because I had this discussion last week with the great guys of TLC Lab in New York, Jabe and Simon Marcus. They came up with the similar idea because they tried to use Kanban in the way that you described it.

What I said to them is that you can put that work on the Kanban board and put a container around it and just ignore that it’s on the Kanban board. What will still happen is that people will look at the container that’s protecting this design work from the production constraints so to speak and somehow feel like it has been a stranger on the board. Now you could have a very great company culture and everybody will tolerate that stuff on the Kanban board. On the other hand, if it's on the Kanban board the Kanban system should be helpful of this work otherwise you would not put it on the Kanban board.

Again, this process is completely non-linear and going on and on as you say, my question would be of what help word Kanban be for the designers and I think of no help. If you look at what's going on in the gaming industry, how they’re coming up with new ideas for the games is in very small prototyping teams which are not working in any method. Maybe Design Thinking or maybe Design Studios, but they’re not working on any development-like or production-like methodologies. Rather what they do is something which Toyota might call set base design, so highly parallel work in very small teams to come up with lots of new ideas for a similar problem. I think this is good but you can't organize it on a Kanban, at least not that it would help so you could do Kanban but I think it would be of no help for anybody.

About Markus: Markus Andrezak has been active in different contexts as Product and Development Manager for high traffic and high revenue web sites. During the last years his main focus has been transitions towards Lean and Kanban product management and development practices across his portfolio. With Arne Roock, he also co-authored 'Replenishment', a free eBook on Kanban. His Blog: Portagile and Twitter: @markusandrezak. You can find more information at his company website: http://ueberproduct.de/en/.

Lean, IT, Kanban, Dev/Ops, DeGrandis

I interviewed @dominicad (Dominica DeGrandis), who teaches and coaches teams using Kanban for IT Operations and Development Operations.  She is an independent consultant as well as an associate of David J. Anderson.  Her background includes ten years of doing Configuration Management, build and deployment automation, and server & environment maintenance, followed by leading teams performing those functions.

Dominica is my podcast guest next week. In lieu of a written excerpt introducing the podcast,  I removed the portion of podcast that specifically discussed Dominica’s Dev/Ops Class.  From Dominica’s website:

The DevOps movement is shifting the focus away from separate departments working independently to an organization-wide collaboration — a “systems thinking” approach. It’s about addressing all the work as a whole, versus looking only at the bits and pieces, or only looking at capital versus expense. It’s about work flowing across functions (versus lurking in silos) and delivering the right thing quickly.

I think whether you are a Dev/Ops or just a Kanban fan,  you can take some insight from her workshop outline.

Audio file on Dominica explaining her Dev/Ops Class 

Well heck, a short excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  One of the statements I heard in your talk in Boston is that you can set policies in place, instead of solutions. Could you explain what you mean by that?

Dominica I love policies. We talk about making policies explicit. This is all about, stop hiding the rules. That's really what we mean when we say, "Make process policies explicit." "Stop hiding the rule on page 200 that's in some document that's buried out on a share that nobody can find." If there's a policy, for example, say developers are supposed to check their code into this branch, then put it up, make it visible to them. Especially new people being hired, they don't know where to go find policies. Put policies up next to your Kanban board, or put them at the bottom of your Kanban board. Sometimes you'll see a policy at the bottom of each column, and that's the policy for the criteria before the item can be pulled into the next column. Policies can be changed when they need to be changed.

Policies are really just a short‑term, tactical fix to make an improvement while you're waiting on some longer term strategic fix. Policies can come and go, and be modified. The idea is that if a policy is staring at you, it's much easier than to have a discussion about why it's a bad policy or a good policy, or how it needs to be changed.

Another short Audio with Dominica DeGrandis discussing Personal Kanban

P.S. There is plenty of material left for the Podcast next week!

Simple, Easy to use Lean Six Sigma Software tools

When talking to most Lean Six Sigma Consultants they will tell you the 2 lean tools that you start with are 5S and Standard Work. Looking for a simple way to describe the Standard Work process, I ran across this software company and their set of tools. I found them quite interesting and have started "Testing" them out. I wonder has anyone else tried them?

Here is a description and a picture of their template. Tools for standardized work are the most important tools in your Lean toolkit - because they avoid backsliding into old habits

The Standard Work Sheet Excel template is 5 tools in 1:

1. Value Add Analysis (auto-calculates pie chart)
2. Work Balancing (auto-draws work load balancing bar chart in relation to Takt Time)
3. Standard Work Instructions & Analysis
4. Quick Changeover tool for setup reduction.
5. Standard Work Combination Sheet visual time chart.

What makes these templates unique is that they are built on Excel spreadsheet platform.

You have options to:

• Auto-draw a Standard Work Combination Sheet with a single click of a button.
• Create a separate time chart for each operator, or display all operators in a single chart.
• Use either stopwatch or video Time Observation to observe and time your standard work procedures
• Split your Value Add Pie Chart into your own user-defined types of waste
• Plot as many as 4 chart lines - for Takt Time, Target Cycle Time, Cycle Time, and even a 4th user-defined chart line (perhaps for out of cycle work?)
  
  Draw the chart with or without labels
• Include up to 200 lines of work elements on a single chart
  (and spread even larger processes over multiple charts - perhaps with summary data rolling up to each higher level)
• Define your own header data field labels
• Link to or from another worksheet for calculations such as Working Time Available, product mix, or master scheduling...
• Paste a picture of your Spaghetti Diagram on the same page with your Standard Work Combination Table!
• Use this as a Quick Changeover tool for Lean SMED setup reduction

I think it is a pretty unique product. You can download a free trial but I think it will ake a commitment to use these templates so if it is free, you may just never commit.

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