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Team Kanban Practitioner

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Lean Kanban University is introducing a new entry level Kanban class for Team Kanban together with a certification and professional credential, TKP, Team Kanban Practitioner. This new class becomes the entry level on the “alternative path to agility” and reflects the market reality that most Kanban starts shallow and at the team level.

Team Kanban Practitioner (TKP) classes are just 1 day and can be taken at our new training facility in Seattle, The Anderson School of Management, located at 200 First Avenue West, Seattle WA 98119 close to Seattle Center, Key Arena and the Space Needle. Check our listings for available classes Training

Team Kanban Practitioner class participants will receive a certificate and the professional credential TKP. This is the first step on the “alternative path to agility.” Completing two 2-day classes on Kanban Systems Design and the Kanban Method implemented through the Kanban Candences, earns participants the higher level Kanban Management Professional, KMP, credential.

The Kanban Coaching Professional and Accredited Kanban Trainer credentials are unaffected by this announcement.

Class Agenda

1st session (90 minutes)

Introduction and survey of existing Kanban experience

3 Agendas (focus on Sustainability)

Principles & Practices

Meanings of kanban

Basic kanban concepts

     – visual board

     – local cycle time metric

     – WIP

     – delivery rate & Little’s Law

Discussion of Cartoon

Feedback loops – standup & replenishment

Morning Break

2nd session (90 minutes)

Game – getKanban in Quickplay mode or Klaus Leopolds’ boats game depending on trainer preference

Game debrief

Lunch Break

3rd session (90 minutes)

Board designs (including personal kanban)

WIP limits

Risks (e.g. Tactical|operational|strategic|sustaining, cost of delay Expedite|Fixed Date|Standard|Intangible)

Design-a-board exercise

Afternoon Break

4th session (90 minutes)

What next…

Explanation of service delivery workflow kanban

Revisit 3 Agendas – next focus on Service-orientation

Proto-kanban versus full kanban system

Benefits of extending kanban up/down workflow – improved service delivery – overview of STATIK and outside-in customer focus – upsell to 2-day class

Closing exercise – reflect on what have you learned and what next, what will you do differently next tomorrow?

Who should attend?

Any team member in a professional services organization where the team or its members suffer from over-burdening and would benefit from better visibility into their work and relief from over-burdening through the use of work-in-progress limits. Anyone who has seen others benefiting from the use of Kanban Boards and would like to learn how to do it for their team.

Learning Outcomes

Attendees will learn about various styles of team kanban board and how to choose the correct style for their current way of working. They will learn how to behave and collaborate when practicing Kanban at the team level. They will be able to go back to their office and implement a Team Kanban Board (some form of proto-kanban) and get started. They will also have a fuller appreciation of service delivery workflow kanban pull systems and why advancing to the next stage of Kanban Management Professional is an important and valuable step on their journey along the “alternative path to agility.”

Kanban Cadences

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Recently, I’ve taken a new approach to teaching The Kanban Method. The new Lean Kanban “Practicing the Kanban Method” class is built around the 7 Kanban Cadences – the cyclical meetings that drive evolutionary change and “fit for purpose” service delivery. Two of these meetings are relatively new additions to the method: Risk Review added in 2014 as a response to Klaus Leopold formalizing Blocker Clustering in 2013; and Strategy Review as an emergent response to the concept of “fit for purpose” and the need to sense the external environment, in order to be able to respond appropriately. The other 5 were existing elements of the method, though the first edition of my Kanban book ommitted Service Delivery Review. In truth our training has not until now emphasized these meetings and particularly replenishment/commitment and delivery planning have not been explicitly taught. Little wonder then that these very basic functions of Kanban have not been well implemented in the field.

Kanban Cadences

When implementing the 7 cadences we don’t expect people to add seven new meetings to their organizational overhead. Instead we expect to find existing meetings that change be adapted and tuned up. Also at smaller scale we expect the meetings to be combined. We’ve also got one client who combined SDR with Replenishment/Commitment because the audience was the same. However, the SDR is on a bi-weekly cadence while Replenishment is weekly. To facilitate the combination they simply increase the meeting time by 30 minutes every other week. Delivery Planning is covered in the Kanban book but is for the first time being emphasized separately in training. Showing that Replenishment and Delivery Planning are separate meetings emphasizes the deferred delivery commitment taught in the class and really helps to underscore differences with methods such as Scrum where the two are combined and coupled together. By decoupling commitment to service a request from commitment to a specific delivery date, you can increase customer satisfaction by better managing their expectations and making promises you know you can keep. It’s been an important element of Kanban since 2006 and finally we are making it more  explicit in our training.

There are 10 feedback loops on this diagram showing information flow and change request flows between the different meetings. Information flow is intended to facilitate decision making for example, output from a replenishment meeting would appear as information at a standup meeting. Change requests imply that something is not working well enough, that there is perception that some current policy is leading to an outcome that isn’t “fit for purpose,” for example, both SDR and Ops Review will provide capability information to a Strategy Review together with a requets for a change of strategy due to a lack of operational capability to deliver on current strategy.

ESP compared to Kanban Method

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I’ve been giving some careful thought to why it became necessary to create the concept of Enterprise Services Planning.

At the most fundamental level, ESP was necessary to provide a container for the collection of things we were teaching that were beyond kanban systems and beyond the scope of the Kanban Method. These were the things that enabled the optimal and effective use of kanban systems – topics such as: probabilistic forecasting and statistical analysis; qualitative risk assessment; real option theory; connecting strategy to operational mechanisms such as Kanban capacity allocation; and so forth. ESP represents a system of management for an entire professional services business. It isn’t just an IT thing and it certainly isn’t just for operational management of a single service delivery workflow. So we needed a name that encompassed concepts that were a lot bigger than Kanban.

The second reason is that we needed a concept and a message that resonated with senior executives – something that would help them understand why they should care about Kanban and what it might do for them. Enteprise Services Planning seem to fit that bill. The focus on “fit for purpose” and evolutionary change based on sensing the external environment and responding to changes on the outside with changes on the inside, seems to appeal to senior executives.

This led me to the conclusion that Enteprise Services Planning (ESP) is intended to be implemented Top-Down and is focused from the Outside-In.

The truth of the Kanban Method, as those who’ve attended a coaching masterclass will tell you, is that it was intended and designed as “change led from the middle.” It was a method to effectively lead and implement successful change for middle managers not endowed with large budgets, significant power, and a mandate for a large scale change initiative. However, we have to recognize that the working reality of Kanban adoption around the world is that it is largely Bottom-Up and from  the Inside-Out. We even address this in our scaling advice when we talk of first scaling up and down the value-stream. The assumption is that the most likely proto-kanban implementation is focused on the middle of a end-to-end service delivery workflow. The input to the proto-kanban isn’t coming from the direct customer but is a hand-off from an upstream partner, and often the delivery from the system isn’t directly to the original requestor either but to a downstream partner who may batch things for delivery.

So Kanban has been Bottom-Up and Inside-Out while we anticipate Enterprise Services Planning to be Top-Down and Outside-In. This means we anticipate a whole different approach to selling ESP in comparison to selling Kanban. We also expect the approach to training and adoption to be different. Initially we are only offering ESP training privately directly to clients on their premises, while Kanban training is extensively open registration and easily delivered to mixed groups from many employers.

We also anticipate the adoption of the Kanban Cadences to be different. With ESP we expect to start at the top and lead with strategy. This diagram shows the anticipated adoption sequence of Kanban Cadence meetings during an ESP initiative.

kanbanespcadenceadoption

If we compare this to the expect adoption for a typical Kanban initiative, you can see how different it appears

kanbanmethodcadenceadoption

With Enterprise Services Planning, Kanban (represented by the Replenishment/Commitment, Standup and Delivery Planning meetings) comes last, as we don’t automatically assume that use of kanban systems is the solution to “fit for purpose” service delivery and a more successful business. We start by understanding the problem from the business perspective in terms of what businesses and markets do they wish to be in, and from the customers’ perspective in each of those market segments.

With Kanban, initial shallow adoption has tended to be internally focused and intended to provide relief from overburdening and to smooth unevenness in flow. The benefits to the customer are potentially coincidental. The motivation is usually to make things easier for the workers. With ESP the focus is explicitly on the customer and the business strategy right from the start.

LKNA15 Miami – Enterprise Services Planning – the Future of Kanban

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Lean Kanban North America takes place in Miami, Florida 8-10 June 2015 at the Eden Roc Hotel on Miami Beach. This year we are both going “back to our roots” while “looking to the future” with a very specific Kanban practitioner event. If you are already doing Kanban and want to know how to take your practice to the next level, or you are curious how to scale the benefits to your entire organization or a business unit, or you just want to know how to apply Kanban outside of IT and software development, then this is the event for you!

In 2015 we launched Enterprise Services Planning, a management system for creative and knowledge worker industries that encourages improved service delivery, better customer satisfaction and a business that is “fit for purpose.” Are you curious about Enterprise Services Planning and how it leverages Kanban to improve your business? Are you curious to see the latest Enterprise Services Planning software solutions? You need to be in Miami this June at Lean Kanban North America. We’re back to our roots in the same city as our first conference in 2009, while we look to the future with the enterprise-wide management solution, Enterprise Services Planning (ESP). We’ll have a full pavilion of vendors offering ESP solutions – come and see the latest software and learn about our new modular 5-day training program in ESP.

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Your business is an ecosystem of interdependent services. You can learn to manage these better with Enterprise Services Planning. ESP is about scheduling and sequencing work, forecasting delivery dates and outcomes, allocating capacity and managing dependencies, understanding risk and learning how to hedge it and embrace it for opportunity and economic benefit. Learn to run an effective, risk managed, business, that produces superior customer service and both “fit for purpose” and robust & resilient to a rapidly changing external environment, using ESP. Enterprise Services Planning is the new way to manage your complex, modern 21st Century business. ESP software solutions make it easy to translate what you learn into action. Come to Miami and experience how the future of work will be managed.

The Meaning of Kanban From the Inside

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Kanban from the inside! What does that mean?

Perhaps it’s about practicing Kanban and it is written by a practitioner? And that would be true!

Perhaps it’s about understanding Kanban and its community of followers from a community insider? And that would be true too!

Or perhaps it is about something deeper, something truly “from the inside”, from inside the author? Kanban from the heart? Kanban from the soul? Kanban expressed by a deeply spiritual person with a strong sense of self and a deeply held set of values?

Mike Burrows was an early adopter of Kanban and an early member of our online community. It helped him do his job. It helped his organization get work done, manage risk better and improve their performance. It was a solid and effective management technique. It was a useful professional tool for a middle manager with operational responsibilities.

In 2010, Mike Burrows attended the Kanban coaching masterclass and like others before him and who’ve come since he described it as “life changing.” He left with the ephinany that the Kanban guidance he’d been following was rooted in a set of values – values that I wasn’t communicating explicitly. They were values that resonated with someone who quietly follows his religious beliefs. In many ways a private person, Kanban had touched him in a way he didn’t expect.

Since then Mike has dedicated his professional career to the development of Kanban and significantly to makinge its underlying values explicit. Mike has helped to expand the “Why” of Kanban. He’s helped to humanize it and to explain how it represents “change that is humane.” He’s become a highly respected leader in our community. I’m proud to know him and proud to call him a colleague. It gives me great pleasure that we could publish his book, Kanban from the Inside. I know how much it all means to him.

Kanban from the Inside will help you understand why you should care about Kanban and how Kanban and its community care about you. It is also packed with much of the latest guidance, teaching tools, explanations and experience that otherwise you can only access through training classes.

Yes, Kanban is a useful management method for delivering creative and knowledge work services. Yes, Kanban is an effective way to drive improvement in an evolutionary way. Yes, the techniques in this book will help improve the operational performance of your business. Kanban is all of those things and Mike shows you how to make it happen. But let Mike take you further. Discover the soul of Kanban. Discover what is inside! Get Kanban from the Inside! It’s a great read and well worth your investment. Discover a new deeper way to connect with the concepts in the Kanban Method.

LeanKanban Training Roadmap 2015 Edition

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We’ve updated the LeanKanban Training Roadmap for 2015 following the introduction of the modular 5-day Enterprise Services Planning class.

edu.kanban.com_training_roadmap

2015 Edition LeanKanban Training Roadmap

The new training roadmap includes the new Enterprise Services Planning classes but also introduces a new intermediate training class called “The Kanban Method.” People completing the Foundation Level “Getting Started with Kanban – Improving your Service Delivery” class together with the Advanced Practitioner Level “The Kanban Method – Success Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” will receive the Kanban Management Professional (KMP) credential.

As has been the case for the past 3 years, Accredited Kanban Trainers (AKTs) are free to offer a 1-day informational class tailored to specific audiences. These introductory classes are designed to deliver Kanban awareness. There is no set curriculum for these classes. AKTs are free to construct a curriculum that in their opinion is best tailored to their audience and delivers the right level of Kanban awareness based on the job function of the attendees. Certificates of attendance are issued.

The “Getting Started with Kanban” Foundation Level class is now standardized for all new AKTs. The curriculum is defined and trainers use the standard training materials issued from LeanKanban University. Trainers are permitted to customize the training by localizing it into their own language and by adding their own case study. This 2-day class is designed to teach the basic mechanics of Kanban and let participants experience Kanban in action through the getKanban game simulation and the STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach to Implementing Kanban) Method exercises for analysis, design and implementation of a kanban system and visual boards. Certificates of attendance are issued to all attendees who complete this 2-day class.

The new “The Kanban Method – Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business” class at the Advanced Practitioner Level is designed for people with basic knowledge and experience using Kanban. This class focuses on the 7 Kanban Cadences: Replenishment; Delivery Planning; Standup; Service Delivery Review; Operations Review; Risk Review; and Strategy Review. The objective of this class is to teach the full method and encourage deeper implementations. Candidates will learn how the Kanban Method provides an anti-fragile solution through its feedback mechanisms that are designed to respond to stressors by catalyzing improvements.

“The Kanban Method” class has a standardized curriculum and standard training materials. Trainers are permitted to localize the training materials into their local language. All AKTs can offer this advanced practitioner class.

Certificates of attendance are issued for each candidate completing the 2-day “The Kanban Method” class.

For those who complete both 2-day classes, “Getting Started with Kanban” and “The Kanban Method” they will be awarded the Kanban Management Professional (KMP) credential.

Three parallel tracks are then offered: Enterprise Services Planning; Kanban Coaching Masterclass; Kanban Train-the-trainer.

Enterprise Services Planning is designed for managers from line level to senior decision makers who must worry about enterprise scale concerns, customer satisfaction and fitness for purpose. Enterprise Services Planning is designed to delivery practical solutions for pragmatic practitioners.

The Kanban Coaching Masterclass is a step towards receiving the Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) credential. KCPs must complete the masterclass, demonstrate at least 6 months Kanban coaching experience through a case study essay and a panel interview. The KCP track is designed for people who wish to lead or coach Kanban and Enterprise Services Planning initiatives with their employer or clients.

The Kanban Train-the-trainer is a class that teaches trainers how to deliver the Kanban training classes, “Getting Started with Kanban” and “The Kanban Method”. Attendees completing the train-the-trainer are awarded the Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) credential. Only AKTs are licensed to deliver official LeanKanban training.