Kanban Coaching Professional MASTERCLASS: 5 Days Keynotes in a Row with Kanban Legend David Anderson
Barcelona, February 2017. You’ve got to hand it to him. David Andersons blue Kanban book Successful Evolutionary Change was the starting point of most Kanban adoptions around the globe.
The core he covered in his book 2007 is still up to date and had a lot of references during his speeches at the Kanban Coaching Professional MASTERCLASS 2017. And he gave a lot of speeches during the 5 days in front of the international audience, which are working as consultants or management coaches for companies like SAP or VOLKSWAGEN.
Introducing Capability Maturity Levels and Kanban Patterns
Especially interesting was the approach to assess and classify different KANBAN maturity board patterns. This helps to evaluate the maturity of an organization to find a starting point and set the appropriate goals and Kanban board patterns.
The main reason for unsuccessful Kanban initiatives are the imbalance of the organization’s capability and complexity of the Kanban pattern. A Maturity Level 1 organization, without clearly defined processes and unpredictable output should not start with a Maturity Level 5 Kanban pattern, with Classes of Service, Capacity Allocation and Liquidity Optimization.
Even mature metrics like Flow Efficiency should keep in mind but not dominate low Maturity Level patterns.
We’ve seen a lot of variants of Kanban Board designs over ten years. Recently, I’ve come to realize that certain styles of board design, scales or implementation and sophistication of the underlying kanban system, correlate to levels of organizational maturity. This is important because it gives Kanban coaches a means to start a journey of evolutionary change with the right level of stressor (visualization and kanban system design) to provoke just enough stress to enable improvement without too much stress such as to break the system and provoke a backlash ending the adoption of Kanban. David Anderson
New Roles and Events are Emerging
Dividing a Kanban System in Discovery and Delivery Services isn’t that new, but to manage this scopes with the 2 new roles (1) Service Request Manager and (2) Service Delivery Manager is a big step for the “role-less” Kanban concept.
The emerging Kanban events (Cadences) are going in the same direction of more structure and a framework for Kanban systems. It seems that these new features bring Kanban closer to the SCRUM framework. There is certainly something to it, but the differences continue to dominate.
Kanban Coaching Professional MASTERCLASS as Keynotes in a Row
As Agile Coaches, we all respect the “Learning by Doing” concept. But in contradiction to the usually more interactive classes (e.g. with Dr. Klaus Leopold), we only had a few sessions of group work at the MASTERCLASS. But if we sum up all the post-it-sessions we had during the last years, it was some kind of recovery from over-facilitation. The fact that David is a great rhetorician, with lot of exiting and emotional real life stories made the “row of keynotes” a great experience.
To sum up this exciting week, the on-site session at eDreams ODIGIEO, 11 Case studies (e.g. Volvo, Net-A-Porter, Mobile.de) and the keynotes in a row, it was a great and very valuable experience.
