Friday, June 19, 2009

Kanban Blogosphere Roundup June 19th

Scrumban produces 2x productivity gain over Scrum

Today we have an article describing a Scrum-Kanban hybrid & transition (Scrumban) from Charles Suscheck in Dr. Dobbs Journal, Experiences with Kanban. We’ve now had Kanban articles in both Dr. Dobb’s and Better Software so I guess it must be official now

The most significant thing about Charles’ case study is that it appears introducing Kanban produced a greater than 2x productivity improvement over the throughput rate (velocity) being achieved with Scrum on its own. It seems they did notice a significant reduction in waste with Kanban. Charles concludes that, “Kanban seems like a logical next evolutionary step to Scrum.” However, his article is thoughtful and balanced and he talks a lot about context.

This team had, “After 18 months, [...] reached a high level of agile maturity, even incorporating numerous lean principles.” And they had refined their analysis technique so that they produced small stories (1 to 3 days of work) and there was a small variability in the size of stories. Their environment still had a lot of uncertainty over priority and the delayed commitment on developing stories with Kanban was a huge win for them. Read the article carefully. Take time to understand the context and you may discover between the lines how Kanban was a really good choice and where that >2x productivity gain (probably) came from.

Kanban boards

Xavier Quesada Allue posted pictures of some kanban boards he designed for a friends’ business unit. It’s worth noting there are no WIP limits in these examples and hence at best only a loose pull system in operation. But the board design and the use of sticky notes and different colors is worth studying.

Nothingness

Derick Bailey posts a slightly discenting view that kanban systems don’t need to be pull systems. They can simply be signalling systems. Look for next personal blog post on Kanban to read my thoughts on this. Then he goes on to provide us with a very nice tutorial complete with pictures explaining how to make a pull system work and emphasizes (as I have been for 18 months) that a task card is not a kanban card. In his example they use sticky clips and an empty one was a signal to pull something. It is essentially formalizing the “slot” concept that I first talked about with the XIT case study in 2005. I love this idea. Sticky clips rock! What a great way to communicate the WIP limit! An empty sticky clip is the “nothing” that I referred to in the section heading.

Kanban and kanban

Derick sums up with a discussion of how Kanban (capital “K”) has emerged as the name for a methodology that evolved from the use of (virtual) kanban (small “k”). While some folks are getting all hung up about this, Derek seems to have a similar philosophy to mine - it is what it is! The market decided. KSSE (Kanban System for Software Engineering) or a Virtual Kanban System for Software Development (as I first called it 4 years ago) were just too long. The market wanted an easy handle and hence Kanban became a brand. Vive le Kanban!

Is Kanban only for SDLCs?

Joshua Milane posted his thoughts on Kanban SDLC vs PLC at his MITechnology blog. Josh likes the idea of Kanban as a wrapper for a software development lifecycle. He isn’t a big fan of the push for Agile Maturity Models. Neither am I but that’s a discussion for another day. He loves the simplicity of Kanban and how it encourages better learining by doing.

Kanban Demonstrated

YouTube video of kanban in action at the Sailboat Company of Naples, Florida. [Not a software example]

How to Pronounce Kanban

YouTube Video with David Laribee of VersionOne

Personal Kanban System

Jon Miller of Gemba Panta Rei has decided to adopt the Agile style Kanban technique for his own personal work. He’s been trying it out and shared photos and experience. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Kanban Blogosphere Roundup June 18th

Today’s roundup of all things Kanban includes a few articles from a month or two ago that I missed, but first I want to start with something brand new posted today.

Mike Jones at About Agility blog, has been asking “What Can We Learn from Kanban?” He’s only been researching and his main knowledge seems to come from Jeff Patton’s excellent introductory article, Kanban Development Oversimplified. It’s worth noting the use of the word “oversimplified” in Jeff’s title. He’s implying it isn’t the full story. So Mike goes on to re-iterate a couple of concerns others have expressed. This is perhaps because he read an oversimplified article that didn’t address these issues.

(1) Kanban’s lack of iterations is bad. He states that Kanban doesn’t allow an iterative approach which is wrong. You can readily iterate on design and implementation with Kanban. He then goes on to imply that Kanban doesn’t allow you to sync at regular intervals with the business which is just plain wrong. He clearly hasn’t understood the concept of the prioritization cadence and the release cadence. You get all the benefit of time-boxed iterations with none of the drawbacks.

(2) No commitment to deliver. This is a subtle point in Kanban. Kanban strikes a different kind of bargain with the business. There is a commitment to deliver and deliver regularly. However, classes of service are used to control the rules around delivery of specific items and the release commitment is late binding - typically 3 to 5 days prior to a release, no earlier. Kanban also includes a commitment to continuous improvement targeting shorter cycle times, better due date performance and lower variability generally.

(3) Writing Larger Stories. This one is interesting. The main theme of Kanban is “start with what you do now” and don’t change your process, just add WIP limits, re-arrange the prioritization and release coordination, visualize and pull. However, some element of the Kanban community, mostly from London, introduced the idea of an MMF (the reference is usually the Denne & Cleland Huang book, Software By Numbers) but the original Kanban introduction was by Chris Matts then at RBS in London. They using the term MMF but not using the Denne-Cleland Huang definition. However, I never adopted the technique and MMF will not appear in the Kanban book. Nevertheless Mike’s concern is genuine but again misguided. MMF is not about writing larger stories but recognizing groups of stories that represent a minimum level of delivery to be meaningful from a marketing or delivery functionality perspective.

Next…

Overnight Rob Hathaway enabled the Discussion Forums feature at Limited WIP Society. Practitioner to Practitioner discussion is being moved away from Kanbandev Yahoo! group to this new community hub. The Kanbandev group had become unusable as the signal to noise ratio had reach about 1:10. If you have questions about Kanban and would like a genuinely practicing experienced Kanban community person to respond, do visit and join.

Silver Stripe Blog asks “What does a Work In Progress Limit Mean?” And goes on to demonstrate how to do it with the Silver Catalyst tool. Yet another Kanban tool coming to market. I think that makes 7 now but maybe I’ve lost count.

Now for some older stuff…

Margaret Rouse has this piece on Kanban - a way to visualize bottlenecks in your software development projects. There really isn’t much Kanban content in Margaret’s observations. She could have written this article in 2003 based on my Agile Management book. The only thing the book didn’t include was the card wall visualization technique.

Pascal Van Cawenberghe asks Why Estimate? and examines whether estimation is required due to a lack of trust in the organization. His conclusion is that high levels of trust are necessary but not sufficient to eliminate estimation. I have to agree with him. There are still some types of work that need estimation. That’s why we design a class of service around them and do estimates, but only for items in this class of service. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Changes @ AgileManagement.net

I’ve been making some changes at AgileManagement.Net to make it easier for readers to find information and follow new posts. I’ve created separate blog pages with separate RSS feeds for Lean, specifically Kanban, and Agile+CMMI.

For now the existing Agile Management blog will continue to aggregate all the content. Later I will reduce it to Management topics only. However, I will maintain the existing RSS feed for both the home page and the Agile Management blog. The RSS feed will continue to aggregate everything that is posted to this site. The new RSS feeds should enable aggregators to be more focused. Kanban sites can pull the Channel Kanban RSS feed while CMMI sites can pull the Channel CMMI RSS feed.

As a result of these changes, some content in the site has disappeared the navigation or the archive search. The articles specifically about the Agile Management book are no longer available through the site navigation. However, they are still in the content management system and still available on the Internet via direct links. Older news articles that do not appear on the front page will also not be navigable but again they have not been deleted and are still accessible via direct links.

I hope that these changes provide a genuine improvement in utility for users of the site and those who value its content. There are yet more changes to come as I prepare my web presence for the next decade and modify it to accommodate my newer interests in Kanban, CMMI, and other newer areas like Real Option Theory, Management, Decision Making, Decision Bias, Neuro-psychology and Risk Management.

Jon Miller and his Amazing Adventures of Kanban

Incredibly creative piece of writing by Jon Miller of Gemba Panta Rei - The Amazing Adventures of Kanban. Be sure to read it all the way to the end. I doff my cap to Mr. Miller for getting this out today and including work that I published less than 24 hours ago.

Thanks Jon for the link to Limited WIP Society. We owe you one!

Gemba Panta Rei is a great web site - if a little heavy on the Japanese words for my personal taste. Bookmark it! Add it to your RSS feed. Add it to your blog roll! Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management, TPS, Toyota, Manufacturing, Industrial+Engineering

Re-th!nk[ing IT strategy]

My Lean compadre Hal Macomber, one of the leading experts in Lean applied to construction project management and also a speaker at the forthcoming UK Lean Conference [sign up now to guarantee your place at the RSA in September] has beaten me to the punch reviewing Ric Merrifield‘s new book Re-th!nk. Hal’s written a really insightful, thoughtful well balanced review over at Reforming Project Management, go read it now!

The book’s subtitle “a business manifesto for cutting costs and boosting innovation” talks to the times we live in today. However, the book has been about a decade in the making and about 2 years in the writing. Behind the book is an analysis methodology that Microsoft brands as Motion.

The idea is simple! Companies get hung up on how they do things and try to optimize those while they ought to be asking what they do! For example, if someone in an office is sending a fax then we observe the how - sending a fax - and we may try to optimize that - more functions such as delayed send, automatic retry - or switch to a new how such as email. But if we asked the person sending a fax what they were doing they might tell us that the were confirming an order. If we think more about the what - confirming an order - then this can lead to useful insight, cost savings and innovative thinking.

Capabilities Analysis allows firms to analyze what they do in different divisions and to identify duplication. Instant cost saving! The results on this are astounding. Some firms have saved tens of millions with this one step alone. Meanwhile, the remaining capabilities can be analyzed with questions in a survey of stakeholders and classified into brackets such as strategic/non-strategic, work class leader/competent/not competent and so forth. Combinations of these can then be used to make recommendations.

For example, if something is not strategic and we are not good at it then we should outsource it and buy the service instead. If we are good or world class at something but it is not strategic then we should spin it out and sell that service to our competitors. This will realize more shareholder value. If something is strategic but we are not good at it then we should invest in it.

I should mention that Ric is a friend of mine. I’ve known Ric since I worked at Microsoft. Their third collaborator and co-author their 2008 Harvard Business Review article: The Next Revolution in Productivity, Jack Calhoun was an early fan of my book  Agile Management for Software Engineering and used to hand out copies to Microsoft executives. Pity none of them actually read it!

Microsoft use Motion as a method to analyze businesses and make strategic recommendations for investment in Service Oriented Architecture. They teach SOA by showing businesses how to re-engineer into a plug-n-play set of services. This makes SOA easier to implement and more aligned with the business strategy. In my observation Capabilities Analysis is powerful on its own but when tied to a SOA strategy it becomes the Next Revolution in IT Strategy!

Ric’s book is very readable. It’s full of stories of businesses he’s observed that have understood their what’s and haven’t been attached to their how’s. It’s an enjoyable read and/but very light on the theory of Capabilities Analysis. So if you like the message and think Capabilities Analysis is something that would benefit your business contact me and I will be in touch. Technorati tag: Ric+Merrifield, Re-th!nk, Dennis+Stevens, Jack+Calhoun, Harvard+Business+Review, HBR, Management, Business