Introducing Agile to Operations — a.k.a. “The Joy of Trello”

Managing operations in business and driving efficiency is an interesting challenge, as it often requires balancing the standard rhythm of the business with reactive firefighting.

Using Kanban in operations management is fantastic visual method for introducing agile to your business, improving operational efficiency, increasing throughput and eliminating waste. A great lightweight tool for building Kanban boards is Trello, which has a clean user interface and is quick for a team to learn.

Over the years of working in operations, particularly when stepping into new companies, the first few weeks of diagnosis, meeting with stakeholders, reviewing policies and observing procedures usually result in a plethora of “to do’s” that end up with the operations team to resolve — many of which may have been outstanding for months or years. It is as if everyone backs up the dump truck of everything that they want fixed and tip it into your lap. That is where the fun starts that keeps the role interesting!

The starting point of driving operational efficiency is to ensure you are clear on the business goals and strategy, and KPIs that drive the behaviour of leadership.

It is essential that your operational priorities are aligned to these, otherwise they are: (1) unlikely to help the business in providing value to the end customer, and (2) unlikely to gain traction from stakeholders you need to influence to achieve the goals as they are focused on other priorities.

Once you have clear alignment with business and leadership goals, you need to start sorting out your team’s “to do” list into something manageable whilst allowing flexibility to absorb the inevitable unplanned requests coming to you to keep things running smoothly.

In my earlier attempts of efficient operations, I began using the urgent and important matrix from Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” to organise the priority tasks in a spreadsheet, along with action assigned to, due date for action, business function responsible, status, notes, etc. This allowed me to focus on the highest operational priorities and track when tasks were coming due, filter by action owner of business units requesting help. Unfortunately, the time it took to constantly review, update, track and manage all of the operational items coming through the door soon can become overwhelming and the spreadsheet can get out of date.

That is when I discovered the Agile Manifesto and the Scrum Guide. After using agile techniques for software development projects, I realised that you could also apply agile techniques to operations. The concepts such as setting up and grooming a backlog, sprint planning, frequent stand-ups and retrospectives appealed to me as it yielded faster business value and allowed for easier course correction.

Applying these technique to operations is a little trickier however, as it is near impossible to tell your stakeholders to wait for the next sprint to resolve their issue — sometimes these unplanned tasks have to take priority and need to be injected into the workflow of the team. I found my answer on Pluralsight through a brilliant course by Jeremy Jarrell called Bringing Agile to IT Operations, where he highlighted that Scrum was not working operationally due to changing priorities.

Enter Kanban, which is similar to Scrum, but allows for greater responsiveness and is more aligned to operational processes due to its foundations from Toyota arising from manufacturing. Kanban in Japanese translates to “visual signal”. It helps your team visualise work through separate cards on the board and allows you to track progress of work through the system. Using Kanban helps to reduce waste and increase team throughput by limiting work in progress (WIP), eliminating bottlenecks and improving cycle time. There is a good comparison of Scrum vs Kanban from Atlassian.

I started using Trello a few years ago to aid in the visual flow of operations using Kanban techniques, and the shift in momentum and throughput from the team was immediately noticeable. Whilst the approach may be daunting for a team who are unfamiliar with the approach or who want to hold onto their own individual to-do lists and methods, the transparency and simplicity of the method can quickly overcome the initial resistance. It also helps with collaboration and delegation.

Generally, I set up a new board with the following headings — you can tailor your own:

• Backlog (To Do) — the list of all ideas, suggestions, issues and problem, ordered in priority but with minimum detail;
• Planned (This Week) — the team pick from the Backlog to plan their activity for the week and add a little more detail (priority, due date, checklists, notes);
• Doing (Today) — only a small set of achievable tasks intended to be done today;
• Blocked — stuff that is waiting on further input or resolution, and
• Done (This Week) — what your team has done and can celebrate (and report on) at the end of the week.

There are a few gotchas that you will need to work your way through however with the team:

• Be careful on the initial setup, if you are not careful you can start spamming all of your team with updates. Set your email preferences to only receive notifications that suit, otherwise the team will route email to a folder and never look at them.
• Agree on the Definition of Done, otherwise cards will bounce from Doing to Done then back into Doing again (a Kanban no-no) as the task is not fully “Done”.
• You need to be disciplined to manage Work in Progress (WIP) limits in the Planned and Doing columns, or it will quickly become overwhelming and ineffective. This is one of the big pluses of Kanban over a long Excel to-do list — visualising the work helps you to see if you are overloaded. You should ensure that you do regular grooming and archiving of tasks.
• If you are using a standard ITSM ticket management system, you will need to agree how and when to use which system, otherwise you will end up with two sources of truth and contention between workflow systems. In one instance, I ended up using ITSM tickets for problem resolution, and Kanban for longer cycle continuous improvement.

To me, using a Kanban board for operational improvements and efficiency is a fantastic method, it aids with focus, creates a shared “to-do” for the team, is great for transparency and increasing flow. It still allows you to catch all of those suggested operational improvements and put them on the backlog so that they are not lost, and there are two other non-obvious benefits to the operations team:

1. If anyone ever comes to you and asks what you are up to — show them your Trello Kanban board! They will quickly see how many actions your team are juggling, and if the discussion is with your leadership, they can help you reprioritise if necessary, and
2. It is an excellent risk mitigation (if you regularly update the card with actions taken and status) — if someone goes on leave or is hit by the proverbial bus, another team member can jump on the board and filter by your assigned tasks and have a quick snapshot of what you are up to!

Have fun! I would love to hear how it works for you.

Written by Peter Jarrett, Head of Operations at Business Aspect on Medium on 9 July 2018.

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