Kanban Results Feedback

Great feedback below from David Anderson on my recent Kanban results post.

It is really interesting to hear this feedback, as to us in the team these changes have become almost natural and the norm. For example we regularly use SPC chart data in our retrospectives and quarterly reviews, the team often suggest changes to help improve the process, starting new work is often rejected with the focus on completing work in progress first. More recently the team are starting to record touch time to see where they can further improve and drive out waste, and to understand and highlight dependencies between work items.

These improvement have obviously required a team willing to try something different (from Scrum which they were doing before) and want to continuously improve. We also have an experienced BA in the team that works very closely with those upstream and whom has an extremely detailed knowledge of the lines of business that we deliver MMFs to. A focus for improvement has also been with those downstream who release MMFs into the live environment. Finally to complement the improvements in process the team has strived hard in the last year to improve their engineering practices; pairing, Test Driven Development, continuous integration, Automated Acceptance tests, improved configuration management, improvements in coupling and cohesion, to a point where they can release on demand with very low transaction and coordination costs for each release.

There are similar improvements from our other team who are using Kanban, and I will be blogging about these over the next month or so.

A further note is that Dr Peter Middleton is writing an academic paper on our results which will be published shortly.

From David Anderson…

After Lean & Kanban Miami in May, Corey Ladas tweeted that he’d like to see fewer cumulative flow diagrams and more statistical process control charts from teams doing Kanban. At the time, I commented that we had to be patient and that teams would mature to the point where they felt the need for statistically defensible methods such as SPC.

We are beginning to see that maturity develop in the community and it is mostly happening in London. Benjamin Mitchell has been carrying around some SPC charts from his team at BNP Parisbas and showing them to anyone who’ll listen at Ltd WIP Society and XTC meetings. Now David Joyce from BBC Worldwide has blogged results from 12 months of Kanban introduction. He chose to use SPC charts to show the improvements in lead time and defect rates.

I’ve posted this response on my own blog

I did so because I want people to see beyond the basic numbers. While the improvements are definitely worthwhile and I am sure the reduction in lead times, increased number of releases and improved quality is significantly improving business agility and customer satisfaction, David’s data contains a lot more information. It contains further empirical evidence that teams using Kanban achieve high levels of maturity and do so within time frames hitherto unreported in the literature.

I have some thoughts on why this is so. I talked about them at SEPG in San Jose in March. For example, Kanban sets an expectation of quantitative management through its transparency and availability of data. It sets an expectation of kaizen culture (continuous improvement driven from the shop floor) by providing models like bottleneck management, waste reduction and variability reduction that enable teams to visualize and implement improvements. It sets an expectation of flow and the maintenance of flow through swift issue escalation and resolution. And it encourages root cause analysis and resolution to maintain flow and improve predictability.

From the beginning Kanban sets an expectation of high maturity behaviours. Behaviours that appear in levels 4 and 5 of the CMMI. It appears that by doing so from the outset, this really does accelerate improvement and achievement of higher maturity levels.

Our community needs more stories like this. If you have one, please submit it when the call for papers is issued for Lean Software & Systems 2010 in Atlanta April 21-23. We’d love to have you present at the conference.

Meanwhile, a cap doff to David and his team and the remarkable changes that are taking place at the BBC’s commercial arm.

David
http://www.channelkanban.com/