Kanban Implementation, Training, Systems Thinking, Componentised ROI
As I recently tweeted, in our organisation we currently have the following Kanban implementations
- 3 product teams
- 1 IT Support and Maintenance team
- 1 project team (with 3-4 projects in progress at any one time)
- 1 COTS implementation team
- 1 Design team
- 1 SAP support team
Dr Peter Middleton is spending time with us writing many of these implementations up in a series of academic papers. We have seen real tangible improvements and many teams have metrics quantitatively showing improvement.
This is very exciting for me, getting to work with fantastic people and experiencing Kanban implementation in many different fields.
On top of this we are starting to look to improve the whole Value Stream using Systems Thinking. Following meetings with our COO discussing the benefits of Systems Thinking we are embarking on a pilot project within one of our Finance areas. As I have always said optimising the IT portion of the Value Stream only gets you so far, for real improvement we need to improve the whole, and view everything from the customers perspective.
This week has been a great week, on Monday we took 25 of our staff through Agile Introduction training followed by Lean and Kanban training, conducted by Karl Scotland of EMC. This was followed by a day spent learning through an Agile game. The team decided to use a Kanban board part way through the game to help them improve; visualise the work, limit WIP, information radiator. Both days generated a lot of buzz amongst the attendees, many of whom are now looking to implement what they have learnt back on their projects.
The later part of the week was spent with Dr Middleton setting up precursors to the Systems Thinking pilot. We have Vanguard in next week to run their Process Mapping and Analysis workshop to our Business Analysts and Architects.
I also met with Brendon O’Donovan from Vanguard to take him through our Kanban implementations.
Finally we have agreed to move from Prioritised Backlogs to Julian Everett’s Componentised ROI Model for our business cases. We will be piloting this on several small and one uber-large project. A user guide for this approach can be found here.
