continuous-improvement.md

Continuous Improvement

My personal notes on David Anderson's talk about Kanban

Video

David J. Anderson - Kanban's 3 Agendas (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpyXJCsTpqg)

Avoid change resistance

• By nature, people emotionally resist changes on role/responsibility
• because it destroys existing social status & identity

Principles

• Start with what you do now
• Agree to pursue evolutionary change
• Initially, respect roles, responsibilities and job titles
• Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Practices

• Visualize
• Limit Work-in-progress
• Manage Flow
• Make Policies Explicit
• Implement Feedback Loops
• Improve Collaboratively, Evolve Experimentally (using models & the scientific method)

Motivations

• Senior-level (agenda: Survivability)
  • lead business strategic moves
  • make promises they can keep
• Mid-level (agenda: Service-Oriented)
  • up-managing - answer hard questions with confidence
  • down-managing - make difficult decisions with confidence
• Line-level & Individuals (agenda: Sustainability)
  • relief from abusive environment

Survivability

• Start with what you do now
• Continue to evolve and adjust to survive
• Evolutionary change (no defined endpoint)
  • make a change
  • check against fitness criteria
  • adopt the change if works, otherwise rollback

Fitness criteria

• measure what clients value / care about
  • Delivery time
  • Quality
    • Functional quality
    • Non-functional quality
  • Predictability
  • Safety (conformed to regulatory requirements)
• measure actual outcomes
  • customer satisfaction
  • employee satisfaction
• measure change outcome (temporary during an experimental change)

Benefits

• No large scale change initiatives
• Sensitive to changing external environment
• Capability to change quickly & continually
• Improved customer satisfaction

Service-Oriented

• Kanban system = pull system + work-in-progress limit
• Commitment is deferred, before a work item entering the system
• Define system lead time = starts only when committed, finished at the 1st infinite queue
• Average delivery rate = WIP / average system lead time (Cumulative Flow Diagram & Little's Law)
  • when WIP is a fixed variable, delivery rate & lead time become predictable.
• View what you do now as a set of services
  • Look for:
    • Creative work = service oriented
    • Service delivery has workflow
    • Workflow has a series of knowledge discovery activities
  • What to do:
    • visualise the workflow on kanban
    • identify different service requests
    • track work flowing through the workflow

What service do you provide?

1. Who are your customers?
2. What do they ask you for?
3. What do you do to those requests?
4. Where does the finished work go?

Benefits

• Predictability
• Shorter lead time
• Increased delivery rate
• Improved trust with customers
• Eliminated disruptions

Sustainability

• start with small changes
• use kanban to balance capability & demand
• in IT, demand often exceeds capability
• find ways to reduce demand load
  • shape demand - Capacity Allocation Policies
  • eliminate failure demand (bug tickets), disruptive & speculative demand (estimation) - visualise different work types
• find ways to improve capability
  • WIP limits
  • Manage flow efficiency
    • Focus on source of delay, waiting time
    • Find out how much % of waiting in the system lead time.
• infinite-WIP-limit Done queues in the flow reduce lead time predictability

Benefits

• Increased transparency
• Engage people emotionally
• Collaboration
• Greater empathy with visualised work
• Reduced multitasking