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January 13 - January 15, 2019
Sure Kanban can help us visualize what problems to solve. But it is doing something about them that makes the difference.
no real improvements can be made without good leadership.
Kanban is great in helping you visualize the current situation, but it doesn’t tell you what to do. You need to decide that!
The final leap is to shift focus from optimizing flow to optimizing value.
The key to sustained progress is not so much about implementing a process, but about developing a conducive culture for thinking people to help you evolve—people who care about what and why. Managers who fail to nurture thinking people as their key objective will just copy and paste others’ solutions.
It’s easy to confuse actions (fulfillment of your implementation plan) with real improvement.
Clarifying your intentions, improving the whole, having regular conversations with people doing the work, and taking part in problem solving are examples of leadership behaviors that can help you build up trust capital.
We achieved three things by shifting management’s attention away from executing detailed plans and toward evaluating and improving output. First, managers focused on quality and flow efficiency instead of resource-usage efficiency. Second, and even more important, managers began to question and reflect on the effectiveness of the current way of doing things. Third, we now had transparency of the current state, which is the stepping stone to impacting the future.
it’s not the processes, the planning, or the execution that drives improvements and innovations. What it really requires is the initiative taken by the people involved. An experimental culture among the management team is crucial to help make the leap from preserving what is, to looking at what is possible.
For a process to be useful, the people who use it have to take ownership. To do that, the process has to be simple.
If you want to improve at the system level, you need to measure and share feedback from this level, too.
If for any reason you are not able to continuously validate the usefulness of a product under development, alarm bells should ring. Regardless of your choice of development method, this is your first clue that something will go wrong.
Once a month, the manager of the IT department (our Kanban board owner) pulled together one representative from each development team for an improvement pulse or a quick retrospective, in front of the Kanban board. The agenda for these was very simple. The manager would review metrics (lead time and customer usage feedback), review the board (is it clear, easy to view, and useful?), and make necessary changes to the board. The meetings let managers take the pulse of the team and were typically very quick—about 15 minutes—with changes to the board made immediately. The improvement pulse may
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This is one of the upsides of Kanban: by demonstrating how work happens, right now, your interventions are more likely to target real problems.
Basing improvement decisions on documented processes is not a good idea because it is a flawed premise based on flawed assumptions—namely, that documents reflect how work really happens and that they provide fact-based guidance to your biggest improvement opportunity.
The importance of the role of communication during change cannot be overemphasized. Keep this as a rule of thumb: a change should never come as a surprise.
The agenda was to walk the board, reviewing whether something needed attention.
We discovered the first problem right away. When I asked each person to identify the biggest problem, everyone had a different answer. While everyone had his or her own view of the situation, there was no common view or shared perspective.
A challenge to using the 5-Why technique (similar to our root cause diagram) is knowing when to stop. If the cause is outside your sphere of influence, then stop. Strive to do something small that improves things, even if it isn’t the perfect approach. Over time, the small things add up.
A good leadership strategy is to always do something, regardless of how small, to improve the current state. The effect of improvements is cumulative, so don’t underestimate the effect of small improvements. By making many small improvements, you are also setting a good leadership example; people will do what you do, not what you say you would do.
The second thing to do in good leadership is to follow up with vigilance on improvement actions taken. Nothing derails trust and breeds resentment more than people not pulling their weight. Visualizing the improvement action and asking participants to report their progress in front of everyone else makes them accountable. This is a good way to follow up on improvement actions taken.
Roughly every six months, the team revisited all the routines and asked questions such as, “Is this useful?” or “Should we do this differently?” Kanban forced the team to clarify how and why it was doing certain things.
In the real-life cases where I’ve used concepts, my first comment to anyone who wants a product idea developed is, “That’s a cool idea. Are you prepared to become the concept owner of this?” If the person answers no or with something like “uh, that’s someone else’s job,” we stop then and there to avoid wasting time and energy on ideas that no one is passionate about. If you want it, you make it happen! The implied criterion is that you have to care enough to make it happen.
