Using Swift-Kanban for customer portfolio management

My business focuses on lean-agile coaching, consulting and training, not on software development services, and I successfully use Kanban to manage my customer portfolio.

It is untrue that Kanban is only good for software change management work. Many people new to Kanban have this misconception mainly for two reasons. One is because Kanban started in a change management team at Microsoft. The other one is because David J Anderson declared that Kanban is a method for change management in the organization and that statement can be misinterpreted. What David meant with that is Kanban helps you bring positive change to your organization. Although the original Kanban description is around software it is actually context free. There is a very popular book entitled Personal Kanban by Jim Benson that I invite you to consult.


Getting back to the main subject of this blog. I have been using Kanban for years to manage customer-facing and business-facing activities. The customer facing activities Kanban board has one swim lane per customer for easy visualization of the activities with each customer and to avoid making mistakes on which customer a given activity is for.  Each customer has its own backlog, which we make visual as the first column on the board. The other columns are Ready, Execute (doing/done), Customer verification, and Completed columns. The WIPs for each customer are different and in agreement with the customer needs and my resources. The figure shows our Swift Kanban board for one of the countries where we conduct business. In addition to making remote communication easier, a huge advantage we have with Swift Kanban is that it allows us to resort the lanes up and down to indicate level of priority and activity (we used the smart lanes feature to accomplish this). That is, a lane (a customer) bubbles up if the our level of activity with that customer and its priority increases and bubbles down if the activity/priority decreases. That way if we will not be doing any work with a customer for a while its lane is "out of the way"; and it is still readily available to resurface at a moment's notice. We also count with a swim lane called "other" for general work that has to do with potential customers when the relationship hasn't matured yet to the point of earning a dedicated lane.

Our classes of service are

• Business task
• Business appointment
• Business partner / associate task
• Fixed delivery date
• Immediate

Intangible tasks are business-facing and are, therefore, on a separate board.
Cheers,
Masa K Maeda

Kanban and the Focus on Fundamentals

(Previously published in the DJ Anderson Associates sponsored eBook - Quotable Kanban)
Our Kanban journey began early in 2010 when we decided that we would build a product in the Kanban space that would address some of the basic issues we saw our prospects face in adoption of Agile methods such as Scrum and XP within their organizations that were historically used to doing waterfall or iterative or some hybrid Agile method that combined more than one type of processes.

While the presence of established competitors was a strong reason to look beyond the ‘popular’ Agile methods, we also felt a strong appeal for Kanban existed because of its focus on 3 key fundamentals:

• Evolutionary change
• Improvement of existing processes
• Engineering rather than Management processes

We have seen numerous organizations and teams take on large (revolutionary) process improvement initiatives – be it 6-Sigma or CMMi or even Agile.  We have seen them become consumed with “the task of process improvement” over and over again.  As a result, while there is improvement in the interim, in terms of consistency with which a process is followed in the team or the organization, the overall magnitude in terms of the time, effort and cost, of making the transition becomes huge and management begins to question the benefits!  Kanban, with its promise of evolutionary change, with one stroke, takes care of this fundamental issue.  It allows teams to take on only those aspects of change that they can comfortably handle.

Secondly, with an evolutionary approach, Kanban necessarily tackles current processes in an organization and helps improve them, rather than force a range of new processes on it.  This is fundamental to understanding how Kanban can be applied not just to traditional software processes – but also to popular Agile processes such as Scrum and indeed, to non-software processes – bet they within IT or in general business functions such as Sales or Marketing or Legal! So besides being attractive to software teams, their pull for non-software teams, presented us with a much bigger opportunity, which we are already starting to see materialize!

However, the one aspect of Kanban that excites more than others is that it forces teams to focus on the “engineering” or the “delivery” processes rather than the “management” processes.  This is where, I feel, Kanban truly distinguishes itself from its ‘competitors’, if one may terms them as that.  Through the use of statistical control charts, Kanban helps teams identify their normal performance and their deviations from the normal – the outliers.  Rather than advise teams to simply do better documentation or better management or better reviews, it encourages teams to do better root-cause analysis – and attack root causes for poor performance – be that better or more specific testing, better development or design practices or better collaboration and requirements elicitation from customers. And in doing so, I believe Kanban shows itself to be far more effective than any other framework to start making incremental, lasting improvements in the final quality of the product or service being delivered.

Far too often, after initial gains have been realized through ‘traditional’ Process Improvement initiatives, teams start to question the extra overhead of ‘following process’ and wonder ‘what is in it for them’.  With Kanban, these teams are much more likely to realize lasting gains through evolutionary, (incremental) improvements to basic existing delivery/ engineering processes and measuring their own performance in a much more meaningful manner.

Mahesh Singh

Co-founder, Sr. VP – Product

Scrum Bangalore - Scrum, Kanban and Pecha-Kucha!

I recently participated in a local Scrum event in Bangalore and shared my experience in trying to implement Scrum and later Scrumban within my current organization. I have shared the slides below.

The event was hosted by SAP in their campus and had a keynote speaker who shared the information about Lean/ Scrum implementation @ SAP and how they are trying to transform the entire organization to a newer or “lean” way of software development.

It’s great to see such enterprises adapting to this new wave of software development. It will encourage a lot of other companies to try out such methodologies and share their experiences/ learning. The event had more than 40 participants from various companies like Mindtree, Aricent, SAP, Cisco etc.

There was an interactive talk from David Putman, a UK based consultant, and Srikanth Tadipatri.  Both are currently helping the Tesco India team to move to agile development and they shared their experiences on various topics/ issues related to scrum implementation.

The other 4 presentations, including mine, were in a "Pecha-Kucha" format ( a Japanese style, where a concept is presented in 6 mins, 20 slides, auto-timed for 20 seconds) themed around 'Scrum: Success Stories'.

My talk was about our experience so far in implementing Scrumban – a combination of Scrum and Kanban and how it is helping us to work more effectively. It is hard to summarize the experience of over 2 years in 6 minutes (Pecha-kucha style is supposed to save people from 'Death by Powerpoint' ;)), but I hope I was able to put my points across. 

Here's a link to my presentation, do check it out and feel free to contact and we can discuss in detail.

Participating in LSSC11: Lean on the Rise

Digite participated in the recently completed LSSC11 (Lean Software & Systems Conference 2011), an event focussed on Lean Software Development, in beautiful Long Beach, California.

It was a great experience for me. The conference had a varied set of topics from Lead development, Kanban, CMMi (1 day), Risk Management, Systems Design, Kanban games etc. It was amazing to see this level of change, innovation and creativity in the Lean community and adoption in the industry. Companies and individuals are continually making effort to apply new and improved techniques and tools to the way they have been working and bring about greater productivity, quality and efficiency.

Digite is proud and privileged to help lead this change!  Since we were one of the sponsors and had a booth at the conference, I couldn't attend all the sessions I wanted to, but that was a small price to pay for being there!  Sessions were organized in three parallel tracks, and almost all of them were simply great, so there was no way but to miss out on many of them!

A quick summary of my Learnings/ observations from the conference:

• All the keynotes in the conference were simply fantastic. I specially liked the Keynote by Chet Richards on 'Fundamental Secrets of the Universe'. He shared many anecdotes from his Marines background and spoke about John Boyd and his OODA loop, which are very interesting and has a lot of applicability to the software world.
• Another great talk as by Joshua Kerievsky on Sufficient Design. I liked his observations on 5.x Development death cycle, explaining the state of many products, which become almost dead (with very heavy technical debt/ defects) by the time their 5.x versions come out. And how the "Resume-based development' attitude from the technical folks make one choose heavy design, even for simple requirements. His guidance - one should make design choices based on multiple criteria and most of the time, a "Sufficient" design is good enough to go, than doing very complex design.
• I also loved the talk by Inbar Oren on “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wall – Visual Management and Gemba Walks”. He talked about the impact of visualization and how Kanban boards almost replace the need for any manager to get an immediate status, without participating in a daily standups. Here's a link to his blog with slides.
• The talk by Don Reinertsen on Cost Of Delay was also great. It is a very powerful concept and can be applied to all situations.  While not always easy to quantify, it is a great way to prioritize all work!
• Frode Odegard’s presentation on “Beyond Lean Value Streams: A Systems Approach" was another good one.
• There was also a Tools track where many tool vendors (including Digite) showcased their Lean/ Kanban tools. It was interesting to see alot of innovation happening in this area. We got some good response, as well as feedback for our Kanban tool - Swift Kanban (www.swift-kanban.com).
• There was also a Games track where attendees could play the Kanban game developed by Russel Healy. It's a great game for understanding the Kanban basics.
• Here are a couple of other blogs/ links related to the experience @ LSSC11. They are definitely worth checking out to see what's happening in the world of Lean/ Kanban :-)

Overall, it was a fantastic experience for us. We got to meet some great people including industry thought-leaders, our own customers and prospects, all in one place. Lean/ Kanban is definitely emerging as a powerful mechanism to scale Agile at the enterprise level and to help organizations dramatically improve how they work.

Nitin Ramrakhyani,

Sr. Product Manager, Digite, Inc.