Saturday, October 24, 2009

SEPG NA 2009 - Achieving High Maturity and Agility with Kanban

This presentation from the Software Engineering Institute’s SEPG 2009 conference in San Jose was voted one of the top 10 best at the event. In it I synthesize experience from team with Kanban and the CMMI model. I make the observation that some teams using Kanban to drive change towards improved agility have also exhibited accelerated achievement of model level 4 behaviors.

[Download the slides 7MB PDF]

Kanban Drives Culture and Organizational Maturity Changes

David Joyce has posted a quite remarkable blog summarizing the results at BBC Worldwide since they introduced the use of Kanban, to drive process improvements, one year ago.

Improved Predictability as well as Business Agility

Many people will review this post and look only at the data. As David himself summarizes, the average lead time fell by 8 days from 22 to 14. This does demonstrate improved business agility, a 33% drop in lead time is not to be sneazed at. However, the more careful viewer will observe the dramatic drop in the spread of variation. The upper control limit drops from 70+ to well under 40, almost a 50% drop in spread. What this means is that the team is much more predictable in delivery of new functionality. David is also verifiying that the newer data shows genuine special cause variations outside the limits. While he isn’t stating categorically that the system is stable, in an SPC sense, as there may be some special cause variations hiding inside the limits, the performance shows a dramatic improvement in stability since Kanban was introduce. This is further evidence that the team is performing in a much more predictable fashion. It also implies that the team ought to be experiencing a much smoother working environment with far fewer events that randomize their schedule and distract their attention away from immediate customer-valued work.

Evidence of Little’s Law Cause and Effect

The chart for development cycle time shows direct evidence that Little’s Law is true and that the quantity of WIP has a direct causal relationship with cycle time. The mean drops from 9 days to 3 days but again the spread of variation drops even more dramtically from 31 days to 7 days. Again this is evidence that the team has much greater predictability. Reducing WIP not only reduces cycle time but it dramatically reduces variability too.

The Engineering cycle time chart simply reflects more of the same. Reducing WIP and the policies of Kanban and its expectation that blocking issues will be escalated and resolved quickly has a dramatic effect on both lead time and variability and shows significant measurable gains in both business agility and predictability as a result.

Improved Configuration Management Discipline and Reduced Deployment Transaction Costs

The Throughput chart doesn’t tell us how much value is being delivered but it does show a dramatic increase in the number of releases to production. This rises from one every one or two weeks before Kanban to one almost every working day since Kanban was introduced. To make this possible there must have been an improvement in configuration management discipline and capability and an equal reduction in the transaction and coordination costs associated with a release. This is all indicative of an organization that is maturing and improving in capability as well as an organization that is considerably more “Lean” than it was a year ago, as waste associated with making a release has dramatically reduced.

Bugs decrease with less WIP and Improved Organizational Maturity

The final chart showing defects per week shows that quality did not suffer as a result of introducing Kanban and limiting WIP and that after some time for changes to kick-in that might be associated with an organization growing in maturity and capability the variability in the defect rate dropped dramatically with a small decrease in the mean number of bugs per week. Again this indicative of an organization that is much more predictable.

Conclusions

David is using the SPC charts as report cards. In Donald Wheeler’s scale of adoption of SPC, this is the lowest level of maturity, and SPC as report cards doesn’t fully qualify as quantitative management associated with level 4 in the CMMI model. However, we can conclude that this team exhibits significantly improved performance. They exhibit significantly lower variability and greater predictability and any use of SPC indicates a leadership that is determined to drive process improvement in a quantitative fashion. There is significant evidence of behaviors associated with CMMI model level 4 and this growth in maturity has been achieved in only 12 months.

This seems to be further evidence to back up my claims from my SEPG North America 2009 presentation that Kanban is proving to be a method that leads to accelerated organizational maturity and catalyst of organizational process improvement. We’ve now seen two teams at two significant companies in London adopt statistical process control and show significant progress towards higher maturity behaviors and performance. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence? Hopefully we’ll see more like this emerge from the Kanban community over the next 12 months.

Friday, October 09, 2009

Kanban Class, San Francisco Nov 16/17

I’ll be holding my only Kanban class in North America this year in San Francisco on November 16-17. The two day class is now divided into 2 parts:

• Day 1 - Mechanics of Kanban
• • The first day focuses on case studies, theory and exercises to map a value-stream, model a flow and design a kanban board, identify work item types and classes of service and set WIP limits
• Day 2 - Kaizen
• • The second day focuses on creating a Kaizen (continuous improvement) culture in your organization and using Kanban as a catalyst of change. Attendees will learn how to identify improvement opportunities managing bottlenecks, reducing waste, and reducing variability. They will also learn how to choose and use appropriate metrics to drive change and measure improvement together with an understanding of organizational maturity and how Kanban accelerates the achievement of higher maturity behaviors such as quantative management, causal analysis and resolution and organizational innovation and deployment

Register Now! Both days at the San Francisco State University Downtown Campus for just $1300.