Kanban for Business

Avinash Rao

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Its always the Business, isn’t it?

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“How has your Kanban improved the business?”

• Bragging about a project delivered with 30% additional scope with the same team and timeline using

Kanban

(to anyone who would listen)

• Account Manager: “So, tell me, Mr. self-proclaimed-hotshot, if Kanban is so great, how would you

improve my business? IT is getting more complex, because the world and business is getting more

complex everyday!”

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So that got me thinking.

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So that got me thinking.

Me: “So what is it you actually do, Mr. Account Manager?”

AM: “Simple. 1. Increase Revenue. 2. Reduce Costs.”

What is Kanban?

• Visualization

• Matching capacity and work

• Flow

• WIP limits

• Improve collaboratively

• Surely, any business would benefit from this approach?

• And, isn’t the business where most of these transformation efforts fail, anyway?

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An Opportunity

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A Business role in a Complex account, in a Complex market

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Tough:

• Market, Customer, Environment

• Tough, actually means in a lot of cases, Complex

• “Run it like your own company!”

But mere paas Kanban hai!

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Tough:

• Market, Customer, Environment

• Tough, actually means in a lot of cases, Complex

• “Run it like your own company!”

But mere paas Kanban hai!

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ME

Round 1: When you have a Hammer, the World is Full of Nails!

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So what is an Business, exactly?

• Sales

• Delivery

• What’s the nearest nail? Accelerate Sales process

• What’s the nearest nail? Customer complaints about Delivery

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So I did what any Kanban guru (ahem!) would do.

• Boards everywhere, visualize everything

• Hammer, Hammer, Hammer.

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After a week: Drinking from a Firehose

1. It was just Data

2. It was too much to process

I wasn’t an Coach anymore.

And how exactly does this improve the business?

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ME

Take 2: Kanban of Kanbans

• If there is a Scrum of Scrums, surely, there is a Kanban of Kanbans?

• Problem solved - Only the key items from the individual boards!

• Hmm … what key items?

• Is a delay account threatening? Is a missed dependency?

• What if there is new business in the same area – does that show up in the same Kanban?

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Actually, its more complex than that …

Relationship

Sales

Delivery

Operations

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Round 3: It’s a Portfolio, stupid!

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Local Optima

• In a portfolio, how do we influence each Actor’s behavior?

• A board for each interaction?

• The right level of abstraction is in place, but will we have a collection of local optima?

• There is a Services Supply Chain!

• Are Supply Chain measurements the same as the Portfolio components?

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Take 4: I need LEAN

• Process maps to deep-dive into the end to end process

• Process team focused again on the projects – while the indicators are primarily on the projects, the

metrics and actions are often elsewhere

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And now, Round 5

• What does a Kanban mean, really?

• Andons

• Supply Chain measures

• Examples

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Questions?

Thank you!