Person of the Month — David Wilson
David Wilson is an Agile Coach at Wells Fargo. David loves helping people have their “light-bulb” moments through coaching agile, and specifically, in applying the Kanban Method. He considers himself a pragmatic realist, which helps him have a change management focus when coaching. When not at work, David spends his time as a volunteer firefighter, and enjoying time with his beautiful wife, a professor of philosophy and attorney, and their six dogs living in a cabin in the woods.
In this story, Joey talks to David about how he discovered Kanban and what he’s doing with it now.
Joey — How did you get started with Kanban?
David — I learned about Kanban as an approach to managing process improvement work. When I began coaching a team that was reviewing and improving a large end-to-end process, I struggled to see how they would be effective and efficient using scrum. My natural curiosity for finding a more efficient and effective solution is what started me down the path, and often the deep, dark hole that Google searches can be on the topic of Kanban.
Fortunately, I had other coaches who had experience with Kanban and offered their advice. The advice helped as the effort with my first team started strong for the first few weeks, and then completely fell flat. I offered little regarding practices around work item types, classes of service, work in progress limits, or the practices in general. However, it didn’t matter. I had a taste of a different way of working. I knew this was what I wanted to focus on.
Wanting to supplement my excitement with theory, I took the Kanban Management Professional I and II classes. As a pragmatic realistic, the evolutionary change approach (starting with what you do today) resonated so much, that I decided to focus my role as an Agile Coach into learning and helping teams and organizations adopt the Kanban Method. Teams I’ve worked with have appreciated the transparency, improved prioritization and work discussions with managers, natural progress toward cross-training and collaboration, increased throughput, substantial savings in deliverable cycle times…the list goes on.
Joey — Can you show us your Kanban?
David —I can’t show, but I can tell! We use a digital tool for our Kanban systems. The tool offers many features that allow us to apply practices of the Kanban Method. For example, we use swim lanes to match the archetype classes of service (it’s possible for teams to expand beyond the archetypes, though we are early in our maturity and aren’t realizing a need yet). We use colors to support work item types, blockers, and classes of service. We use visual elements to indicate when we exceed WIP limits, inciting the team to focus on resolving backups.
By design, the cards promote effective decision-making from both a discussion and capacity perspective. Additionally, our card designs include elements — such as work item type, related epic, due dates, and profile pictures of assignees — that make the conversation focused and efficient regarding which work to discuss and decisions need to make toward completing work.
Beyond board and card structure, we look at datasets to understand both trailing and predictive data, supporting trends and improvement. More specifically, our data centers around arrival rates, throughput, stability, system lead times, cycle times, discard rates, abandon rates, and abort rates, all as a baseline to support our teams.
Joey — Do you see Kanban getting used by other parts of your organization?
David — 21% of our organization uses Kanban. Typically, the Kanban teams average about 7 members each. We anticipate this percentage growing over time as teams improve at practicing scrum and start to look for ways to further increase efficiency. However, new teams starting to use Kanban explains the growth over scrum teams advancing to Kanban.
I am currently establishing cohorts and communities of practice for Kanban Service Delivery Managers to support their growth, promote learning and cross-team knowledge sharing, and provide an additional platform to discuss challenges. At scale, we are also using Kanban at the portfolio level to help support prioritization and transparency. As we continue to increase transformational work with various parts of the organization, we will use the Kanban Method to establish feedback loops and facilitate end-to-end mapping. Kanban practices ensure a focus both on effectiveness in providing the customer what they need as well as efficiency to ensure we do it well.
As the organization improves agility and recognizes benefits of service orientation. Kanban usage and maturity will continue to grow.
