Miyagi have hope for you

Thursday.

Google first thing in the morning, Twitter later.
Lean and Kanban for the rest of the day.

At the start of the day, my thoughts on Lean and Kanban are full of excitement. My colleague went to a Lean Anarchy talk on Wednesday and came back totally psyched. I first heard about them when I did my ScrumMaster course, but haven’t had the opportunity to listen to and learn from people who have actually turned their workplaces Lean.

Talk number one. Kanban.


Kanban is the improvement of value through flow. Our vision informs our systems thinking. Our vision transforms process to value.

Teams must be consistent.Team membersmust only work on one project at a time.
Each additional project removes 20% of that team member’s time to multitasking. So, work on one task and you can give it 100% of your attention. Work on three projects, and each one gets
((100 – (3 x 20) ) / 3 ) = 17%
of your time. Which is staggeringly inefficient.

This team then, which is going to stay together and work together (on one project at a time) is built around capability. Or, in the words of Kanban – flow value through capability teams.

There are five steps to kanban.

Step One. Workflow.
Map the workflow. Dig down through the layers and understand. Learn and understand until complete transparency of the workflow is realized.
Ask questions. Get answers.
Learn the process. Analyse the demand. How will the demand inform the process?
Where is the work without capacity? These are the queues. The longer an item resides in the queue, the longer it will take to do.
What items are waiting to come together? These are the batches and items should sometimes be worked on together for the economies of scale.

Step Two. Visualisation.
If you try to visualize everything, it becomes noise. Learn the multiverse. The multiverse allows to you only visualize what you need.
Be creative. Acquire autonomy and mastery of the work. Know what the work is.
Focus on the data. Be creative with the data. Prioritise the backlog.

Step Three – Work in process.
Start work based on capacity. Pull it through the flow. You can’t pus a string of paperclips.
Limit work in process. Reduce multitasking. With limits on work in process, you build in slack.
If there is a bottleneck and you are infront of it, swarm it or improve it for the future.

Step Four – Cadence.
The sprint or the timebox. Everything around the process happens on the tick of a metronome.
Different events can have different rythmns.
If a two week timebox is restrictive, decouple tasks into MMFs (minimum multiple features)
Expensive items should have a longer cadence, but efforts should be made to reduce their cost.

Step Five – Learning.
The timebox is your training wheels. When the flow and the cadence are natural, pull them off.
Always enjoy double loop learning, where the question is not just how we did stuff, but why we do it.


Lean has 7 Principles. Briefly:

Principle 1. Eliminate waste
Principle 2. Build Quality in.
Principle 3: Create knowledge
Principle 4: Defer commitment
Principle 5: Deliver fast
Principle 6: Respect people
Principle 7: Optimise the whole