Lean Change Management: Innovative practices for managing organizational change

by Jason Little

Here’s how I wrote down my hypothesis at the time: I hypothesize that by changing our Enterprise Kanban Board (EKB) to be a portfolio-level board, we can eliminate weekly status reports PM’s currently produce, thus reducing their administrative activities, which will save the department $150K annually, as measured by the time it takes 25 PMs to generate these reports. A colleague and I mocked up a “status-y looking” visualization on the Enterprise Kanban Board (EKB), leaving it intentionally roughlooking around the edges. The goal was to get feedback quickly, and not to have it perfect right from the start. Once we felt the visualization was good enough, we invited the PMO to have a look. I flat-out asked them, “If we show you this data, can the weekly status reports go away?”