The philosophy of lean, according to our first speaker today, is to concentrate on flow, to deliver value through process and to use your vision to inform the whole.
Our first speaker believed that traditional projects delivery starts with requirements generating a team selection to which people are added and the project is completed. At the end of the project, the team is disbanded and the team members are spread out again into new teams.
Doing this releases the capability the team built up during the time it was working together and every project starts from uncertainty and a lack of team spirit.
Disagree with that if you can. I certainly can’t. But then again, neither do I recognise it as a practice I have ever seen. Neither in Waterfall, neither in Agile, not in massive multinational democracies, nor owner-run despotisms.
It’s easy be angry at a world of your own construction.
I’ve seen this many times from evangalists, and it is entirely unnecessary. You can have a good idea, or something great to say without having to prefix your idea with Ragnarokian tales of immenet downfall in order to prove the necessity of it.
Nor do you need to be seduced by entirely spurious FACTS such as the “20% of time is lost to multitasking”. See me? I’m the one holding up the “Citation needed” sign.
The need for religious thinking is strong in man. Now that Dawkins has killed God (or was it Oolon Coluphid?), is there nowhere we won’t look for belief systems?
I do think Kanban is good. I would like to be in a team one day which does it and does it well.
Is it great, though? Well. It seems like a hell of a lot of process and a hell of a lot of slack. Sure, some slack is good. It allows for tasks either side of it to swell a little and it allows for the clean up of tech debt and the improvement of process.
But I don’t think I would want to build a system which assumes that your planning is so bad that you always underestimate tasks. That would worry me.
Tech debt (in an ongoing project like ours) should only really go down from the point when the team starts measuring it. Presumably, you start recording tech debt it when you start improving your process to include the identification of it. Starting any process which implies a degree of self-refection and a more considered approach to coding must surely mark the point when you stop building systems that are crap, but functional.
The goal of the Kanban system is to get rid of the Kanban system.
I love this sort of statement and I refer the reader to toady’s xkcd (http://xkcd.com/870/).
It’s almost like Randal is here with us. I actually get that a lot with Dilbert and I have a message for Scott Walker - kindly stop snooping my life for material. Many thanks.
If the Kanbanites really wanted to get rid of it, I’m sure they wouldn’t make it so complicated. Maybe not complicated, maybe better is – process. Why make it so PROCESS?
Can any team adopt it?
No. I don’t think so.
Some reasons:
We heard the “7 team members, plus or minus two” rule from two different speakers. Personally, I think a team of nine would be too big. Certainly anything more than nine would have to be considered impossible.
I don’t believe you can do Kanban with externals. One speaker was rightly proud of the fact that once he had Lean working, his churn went from 100% per year to 0% for two years. Sure, some externals stay a long time, but you can’t incentivise them the way you can incentivise internals, nor can you really help them to improve. I have never heard of a company sending externals to conferences or on training courses. And neither do I know anyone who would expect them to.
You can most definitely not to Lean without trust and empowerment from management. If you don’t believe you have this from management, don’t start until you do. Unfortunately, it is usually easier for Managers to change team members than for team members to change managers! How to develop and win trust from your management is a whole other topic, but it can be done.
I really enjoyed typing up the first post on Kanban.
Feel the flow. Beeee the flow.
I don’t know if I sound more like Mr Miygee or Yoda. Or Kermit’s cousin Kevin.
As I said, I do want to try Kanban. And even if we don’t, we were shown some excellent visualization techniques. The “Backlog in circles” thing was excellent and I look forward to bringing it back to my team.
People are different. Cultures are different. It is not necessarially a good, an easy or a wise idea for people of one culture to adopt a process from another culture outside of any other cultural reference.
I have always been suspicious of westerners adopting eastern practices. Herbal medicine, philosophy, religion. In this case, quacking like a duck does not make you a duck.
Kanbanners sometimes feel like liberal arts students trying pot for the first time. The traaaaces, man. The colours! Oh wow, you don’t know what you’re missing
Kanban, like pot, might well be an awesome thing, but it’s hard to describe it from within the hazy cloud of bliss without sounding like a little bit of a hippy.
As Daniel says to Mr Miyaggi "but when do I learn to punch?".
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