Part 7 (Scaling Kanban, Upstream Kanban & Feedback Loops) — Why should you attend the KMP Workshop

This series discusses the benefits of attending the 4-day KMP Workshop. KMP Workshop is a collaborative and interactive Workshop. After attending the KMP Workshop, you get the KMP Credential from Kanban University. KMP stands for Kanban Management Professional.

Part 1 to Part 5 provides an eye-opening description of the course contents of the Kanban System Design (KSD) workshop, earlier known as KMP-I.

Part 1 discusses the Simulation Game to experience Kanban. Part 2 describes the three Kanban Agendas. Part 3 summarises the Kanban Principles. Part 4 is all about the six General Practices of Kanban. And in Part 5, You learn the STATIK Approach to designing your Kanban Board.

Part 6 onwards provides the course details of the Kanban Systems Improvement (KSI) workshop, known as KMP-II.

With Part 7, we continue the KSI workshop and cover the Scaling Principles of Kanban.

Kanban Lens

Before you can scale Kanban, you should learn to identify a service. You should determine which one is a shared service in your organization. And to do so, you should apply a Kanban Lens. In the KMP workshop, we practice it through a group exercise.

Kanban Lens explained in KMP Workshop given by Vikas

Scaling Kanban

Do you know that Kanban is an auto-scaled model?

Yes, you got it right. You do not need another master class or another certificate to scale Kanban. It’s all covered in a 4-day KMP workshop.

Kanban can scale at width, height, and depth. In the KMP workshop, I will cover scaling Kanban with an example described in the Mural design below:

An example used by Vikas to explain Scaling Kanban during KMP Workshop

Width is expanding within a service.

Height is creating a portfolio.

Depth is going from one service to N services.

Upstream Kanban

This section will explain how to design an Upstream Kanban board. We will also discuss the roller coaster ride of demand and capacity. We will discuss some of the simple questions that will help as a guide for you. You can use this demand vs. capacity knowledge post-training to balance your systems.

Demand and Capacity roller coaster used in KMP Workshop by Vikas

You will wonder how upstream Kanban is different from Downstream Kanban. And I have an available comparison table that will help you clear your doubts. Join my KMP Workshop to learn more about it.

Emerging Roles in Kanban

Next, we discuss the “Emerging Kanban Roles” — SDM and SRM. We discuss it through a group discussion. We map the existing roles in your organization that can play SDM or SRM.

Representation of emerging roles

Feedback Loops

If you remember, we touched upon three feedback loops in KSD class. For details, refer to STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban). However, there are more than three Kanban Cadences or Feedback Loops. The Kanban method suggests maturing your cadences as your team/organization matures.

KMM Class Feedback Loop Poster

I have a badge of KMM content creator from KMM Plus for my contributions to the above poster. Refer to the Contributors page.

There are two categories of feedback loops.

A. Feedback loops focused on managing and improving the work process of a single service.

B. Feedback loops focused on improving the performance of a network of services.

Few important points to note:

When you introduce Kanban, do more than go and add meetings. Find out the common agenda and outcome. To guide you on this, you will get KMP Workshop material. The material will have infographics for each Kanban cadence. This infographic will help you understand the following:

1. The objective of the cadence.
2. The inputs to the meeting.
3. The output from the meeting
4. Who should attend
5. What should the team talk about
6. Duration
7. And Frequency

A view of the infographic card used in the KMP workshop

This card is only to guide you. You can still change your Kanban Cadences until you do not defeat its objective and outcome.

Are you feeling relieved? So now, you do not need a planning meeting every two weeks, even if everything spills over. You will instead have time and energy to dig data and improve predictability.

You can focus more on optimizing the flow than attending one more meeting with no outcome.

Follow this series for more. In the next section — “Part 8: Strategies for Improvement”, I will cover the last two modules of the 4-day KMP workshop.