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.

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.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Agile+CMMI Conference Anyone?

In a similar vein to the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference I am thinking of pulling together an Agile & CMMI event. I really feel that a small focused event is needed to kickstart the Agile CMMI community and energize potential adopters.

After some initial market research via my Agile Management Yahoo! group and Hillel Glazer’s Agile CMMI LinkedIn group and Twitter, it looks like we are targeting early December or mid-January somewhere in Florida.

Please leave comments indicating which dates you would prefer, which location (a) Tampa, (b) Orlando, (c) Miami, and please recommend anyone you feel should be an invited speaker at such an event. Would you like 1.5 days or 2.5 days and how much of that time should be dedicated to open space?

[Current voting as of 6/17 - will try to update this daily for a while]

1. Tampa 60%
2. Orlando 20%
3. Miami 20%

Your comments and commitments to attend are vital if this event is to go ahead. Without sufficient interest we won’t run the event. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile, CMMI, SEI, Hillel+Glazer

Monday, May 18, 2009

More blogosphere buzz about Lean & Kanban

John Strickler has this thoughtful piece about Lean & Kanban and how he was introduced to Agile via Mary Poppendieck and Alan Shalloway following a background that including reading Factory Physics and learning Six Sigma. Nice to see someone with a background in reducing variation and an understanding of queuing theory talking about this stuff. So few Agile folks seem to understand what I mean when I say Kanban has an underlying model.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Palermo picks up on my piece for Borland on why you should just say “No!” to an formal Agile transition initiative, Why Agile Transition Initiatives Might Fail!

Margaret Rouse highlights Kenji Hiranbe and I and observes that Kanban is a way to visualize bottleneck in a software development project.

Keith Henry’s been researching how to tailor agile to your organization. While he cites my work on Agile+CMMI he might enjoy my series for Borland more: Agile Transition Initiatives - Just Say No!; Creating an Agile Culture!

Jason Yip rediscovered one of my older gems identifying that liberal versus conservative culture is a bigger influence than high trust versus low trust in driving Agile adoption.

Pascal Van Cawenberghe asks “Why Estimate?” and cites several leading thinkers on this space including Amit Rathore, Joshua Kerievsky and me.

Richard Veryard tickled me with his wittily titled Restaurant at the End of the Universe over at his Demanding Change blog.

Defense Industry Daily was so impressed with my Top 10 rated talk at the SEPG conference that they suggest it’s time to Sharpen Yourself a Kanban System for Software Engineering. Yes indeed! :-D We already have a Kanban implementation with the Danish Department of Defense. I’m hoping for more traction in the defense sector in the next year. I really do hope that Kanban becomes the unifying force that brings the Agile world and the big software and system engineering firms together.

Hillel Glazer noted that my SEPG session on high maturity metrics and Agile was packed and locked out and no one left early. I wonder who I impressed? His notes from Wednesday tell the tale of the Agile + CMMI open space with a super picture of how many people we had at that session and then with another wonderful picture of one of my slides we get Hillel’s take on my Agility & High Maturity talk - naturally Kanban is at the heart of it but Hillel calls it correctly - set high maturity behavioral expectations early and choose metrics and data wisely. His Tuesday notes cover the CMMI + Agile: Why not embrace both talk given by Mike Konrad and supported by Hillel, Jeff Dalton and I.

The folks at Enthiosys (Luke Hohmann et al) have been thinking about Agile maturity models and comparing my work on Agile + CMMI with Bas Vodde and Jeff Sutherland’s Nokia Test.

Allan Kelly gives us a list of 10 Things to Know About Kanban Software Development. Very handy! Allan also helps us to Make Sense of Kanban.

Meanwhile, Boris Gloger describes my use of Kanban as “harmful for software development.” How many people actually doing it believe that? I wonder if Boris has ever tried it? Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, Software+Engineering, Project+Management