Anzen. It’s a foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and a pillar of the Toyota Way. It helped a 100-year-old, 60,000-person aluminum manufacturer regain its greatness, and it powers the software products that millions of people love. If you study every Lean or Agile principle and practice, you will find it’s a common denominator. Anzen is the Japanese word for safety.
When Anzen lives within a software product, it just works; people regularly use and recommend it; engineers modify it without fear; it contains few defects; it can be deployed with ease; it is immune from threats; and it helps protect the organization’s finances, reputation and investors. Anzen lies at the heart of excellence.
Anzeneers are empowered to engineer anzen into everything, from their culture to their workspaces, from code bases to processes, from products to services. They use short feedback loops to protect time, energy and money. They use minimum viable products/features, validated learning and innovation accounting to protect resources and stakeholders. They use big visible charts, visualized work and limited work-in-process to manage risks and protect teams from bottlenecks and decreased flow. They use automated testing, continuous builds, refactoring and collective ownership to protect development. And they use lean interaction design and usability evaluation to protect people from poor user experiences.
In this talk I will share what I have discovered about anzen, including why it promotes safe risk taking, how to identify faux safety, when it can be taken too far, challenges of growing an anzen culture and what it means to be an Anzeneer.
Many organizations using or interested in lean and Kanban are also looking at blending the manifestations of these methods with CMMI. The good news is that there is a very simple framework that allows total synergy between the ideas among them. The bad news is that doing so typically requires a complete un-learn and rewrite of what people think they know about CMMI (and sometimes lean/Kanban).
We will generate the framework mentioned above and take examples from lean, Kanban and traditional practices and methods to explore how to use the framework so that the intrinsic synergies among the sampled approaches can be realized. Using suggestions from participants and the facilitator, we will look at particular CMMI practices that often prove challenging and exercise the framework to de-conflict the challenges while also incorporating the essence of the CMMI practice.
Participants will gain an appreciation for how CMMI is intended to work and leave with a simple yet powerful toolkit with the potential to eliminate the need for CMMI consultants. The toolkit can be leveraged to build into their lean/Kanban processes the process performance awareness and continuous improvement touch-points intended by CMMI practices.
Would you like to help your team adopt particular lean, Kanban or Agile methods? Are you looking to spread next gen techniques across your department? Do you want to see your organization become more lean?
Taking inspiration from the business model generation and lean startup world, the Change Canvas is a change planning tool that allows change agents and change stakeholders to collaboratively co-create and co-execute an lean improvement initiative.
Take part in a collaborative, hands-on workshop where you will be coached you through the creation of a lean change plan using the Change Canvas. We will ask session attendees to play the role of an lean change agent, and show them how to use the Change Canvas to successfully negotiate with change stakeholders to develop a change model. Key topics covered will include:
discovering change stakeholders and connecting them to problems expressed in their own language, creating a sense of urgency for the change, and forming a change guiding team
working with change stakeholders to co-create a vision for the change as well as a potential target state
forming a change contract between change agent and change stakeholders through the development of key actions, stakeholder commitments, and potential benefits of the agile change
Regardless of whether you are a team member, program manager, executive or professional agile change agent, the Change Canvas is a lightweight, collaborative, iterative approach that can help you navigate your way through successful change. We promise to provide a hands-on, immersive experience with access to change agents who have had previous experience in applying the Change Canvas to manage change initiatives.
Experiments are central to the Lean Startup approach, but it turns out that running a good experiment is a tricky business. Many experiments deliver ambiguous results, and that's a failure. The whole point of experimentation is to reduce risk and make confident go-forward decisions. This hands-on workshop introduces a practical approach to designing experiments that can be replicated in any Lean Startup environment.
You’ll get experience with efficient techniques for collaborating as a team, making decisions quickly, and establishing priorities. These techniques (known collectively as The Luxr Method) have helped hundreds of innovators around the world improve their Lean Startup practice—including students at Singularity University, 500Startups, and the Office of the President of the United States.
In early January several leading practitioners and coaches of the Kanban Method gathered at the Kanban Leadership Retreat event (KLRUS14). One of the topics discussed was a very common question they are all asked, “How does ‘kanban’ impact my role: as a Project Manager, or as a Business Analyst, or as Product Manager, or as a Program Manager?”
Since the Kanban Method is not a specific workflow (and therefore is not something that replaces your current workflow process), but rather a tool used to improve any workflow process, it doesn’t (it can’t) prescribe specific roles (it isn’t that kind of tool). However, using it to improve your current workflow process (should) clearly result in some noteworthy changes in how specific roles that exist in common workflow process would be performed.
Frank Vega will lead session attendees in this highly interactive session to explore and discover what some of those noteworthy changes would be in a few of these typical roles. Come share your experience and questions as we learn together and begin to help you answer for yourself or others this very common question about using the Kanban Method.
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Peter Drucker
While we focus on efficiency of our teams we often forget a more important part: what work gets done. Once we look at project or product portfolios we quickly realize how incredibly bloated they tend to be. It means that making decisions on new endeavors is difficult and an organization delivers little value. It also means that any team level improvements are insignificant because of inefficiencies incurred by management approach on a higher level.
Let's see what is typically happening with our portfolios. We will run a simulation where everyone will be put in charge of building bright future of an organization deciding on all the projects it runs.
We will experience how estimated cost and expected profit drive wrong behaviors in portfolio management. We will discuss value, risks, Real Options, Cost of Delay, multitasking and utilization as factors we should be considering instead when deciding on new projects or products. Finally, we will learn how Portfolio Kanban drives the change toward optimizing delivered value.
Today’s complex projects need proactive risk management to stand any chance of executing successfully. But the formal methods of identifying, classifying, analyzing and prioritizing have not proven to be effective in ensuring risks are effectively avoided, transferred, or reduced. All risk planning and reduction steps are largely human led activities with success criteria closely linked to social influence, communications and campaigning.
This workshop explains the need for proactive risk management through an examination of the “Flaw of Averages”, it walks through the risk management process through a lean/agile lenses. It then introduces specific practices integrating simple Excel based risk models and social influence. Using case studies, a shared team approach to risk management is described. Through collaborative games, new risk visualization techniques, and empowered teams, examples of risk avoidance and risk mitigation actions are examined.
21st Century risk management should be a whole team activity facilitated by the project manager or risk analyst. Not only is relying on a single person to identify and analyze risks and opportunities inadequate, it also represents an unacceptable risk of its own. A new framework that leverages people’s strengths while optimizing the whole value stream is presented.
I am doing a workshop at LKNA and I am going to do a risk management toolkit - building on the work Mike Griffiths and I did at PMI - INCOSE this year embedding program risk management into Agile processes. I will work in simulations for identifying and managing potential impact of dependencies, capacity uncertainty, and demand/scope uncertainty.
Is (lean/kanban/agile/SAFe) starting to follow the path of every other management buzzword in your organization? Does your improvement initiative, originally full of excitement now seem to have lost steam? Has your organization created a "hybrid" process to "make it work for us?"
If you’re like most managers, your organization isn't fit for purpose -- and it’s your fault. You’ve introduced a new set of rules, principles, values- and they just don’t fit those that have existed for years in your company. Given this scenario, you have a choice as a modern manager/leader:
1) Accept it as beyond your control, and explain it away as “culture,” “lack of leadership support,” “not right for our organization,” or any of a list of common rationalizations (victim)
2) Be a brave champion of transformation and lead the fight against the tyranny of the old ways….”FREEEEEEEEDOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!” (start brushing off your resume now, dear martyr)
Guide your organization in a journey of safe yet effective disruption...so that it can change the rules as it improves (and join us on the path of catalyst)
Environment design includes the practice of improving your organization successfully by doing the necessary work of correcting misalignments with new approaches and values - subtly, and in a manner that allows as many people to succeed as possible.
Learn how to create a framework for running lean teams and facilitating a dialog between rapid, data-driven experimentation and business goals.
This interactive workshop focuses on improving visibility of work requests and becoming more predictable – even when the work is dependent on IT Operations.
The Issue:
“We don’t have visibility into our requests and it takes “them” forever to finish. How can we see what’s going on so we can become more predictable? “
The Workshop:
a) We begin with an overview of the fundamentals of Kanban.
b) We play the “Kanban for Devops” board game to see how the Kanban principles and practices actually work between and across different teams, hopefully diminishing the dangerous “us/them” paradigm.
c) We discuss winning game strategies, how to measure progress, challenges when rolling out Kanban, and close with Q&A. Bring your tough questions!
The Learning Outcomes:
How & why Kanban works
How to get started
What to measure
Kanban tips & tricks
We say we make decisions, but do we? Most of what we call decisions are habituated actions. If they weren't, then by the time we got through our morning routine we would have decision fatigue.
Few people had any decisionmaking schooling. At the college level, decisionmaking sits in with statistics, operations research and economics with little to no relevance to living our lives. Ask an decision "expert" or decision sciences academic to say succinctly what should decisions be based on and you'll get a puzzled look.
We will explore the basis for making sound decisions with the Choosing By Advantage Decisionmaking System. Participants will learn the fundamentals of sound decisionmaking along with tips for improving the likelihood of getting good outcomes from decisions. The session will be interactive. You'll leave with an immediate boost in the quality of the decisions you make.
- The problems with traditional management, including budgeting
- The Beyond Budgeting principles and companies on the journey
- Statoil's "Ambition to Action" model;
- redefining performance - dynamic and relative targets and a holistic performance evaluation
- dynamic forecasting and resource allocation and no traditional budgets
- from calendar-driven to event-driven; a more self-regulating management model
- Implementation experiences and advice
When we look at the relationship between decisions, options and information, the most obvious relationship is that good, relevant information helps us choose between options, producing good decisions. However, when we examine information and our processes it quickly becomes clear that we don’t always have immediate access to the information we need, it may not even exist yet, or we may not have access to experts that can decode and interpret the information, making it tractable to our decisions. Information, knowledge and expertise is created, arrives and becomes useful over time. Additionally, in many organizations efforts are focused not on creating options, but selecting (deciding) the best option.
This session provides a quick case for change for organizations that seek to understand how to move beyond budgets. It shows how to create more effective controls by moving beyond budgeting. In this session you will:
- Learn how to create a quick case for change to help you focus on your organization.
- Review the 7 common pitfalls of traditional budgeting
- Examine the 12 Beyond Budgeting principles to see how they create a more agile, adaptive enterprise
- Review several organizations that have already eliminated budgets
Going into 2009, HOLT CAT faced a tremendous market downturn as the US plunged into a recession. The company made a key decision to alter its management process into one that immediately made them more agile and adaptive. Gretchen Stepke will share her first-hand experience of why they choose to eliminate budgets and how it changed the focus of management’s attention. She will also share why they continue to operate without budgets even though the economy has rebounded quite strongly.
As the Director of Finance Business Systems, Gretchen can explain how their systems assisted in this transition and where they would like to go.
1. "Visibility is my super power! How visibility & transparency alone can fix problems & keep you from fixating on the wrong things." - Julia Wester
2. "Influence is all about Trust: framing the Kanban Method as expanding spheres of trust" - Jason Yip
3. "Why should I measure and where should I start to do so?" - Wolfgang Wiedenroth
4. "How using continuous discovery improves continuous flow (or) continuously learn and improve your continuous delivery." - Aaron Sanders
5. "Front-end ops and the OODA loop: A decision cycle time strategy for winning in a hostile internet environment." - Erik Sowa
The goals set before us a year and half ago were to stop saying “no” to customers for late or changed scope, while helping them achieve time to value. We have gone through a successful revolutionary change of the way we manage our projects a few years earlier (CCPM), and we felt that the organization cannot handle another revolution. Still, Our customers’ (Telecommunication Service Providers) business required better responsiveness and flexibility, reduce risks and a much faster time to market. Our hundreds to thousands person months complex mission critical projects span up to 70 groups of experts handling products that are tightly integrated over a timeline of a few months, and we had to maintain, if not improve, our quality, while reaching a sustainable development process. The challenge was huge.
In this session we will describe how we pulled it off again, in a completely different implementation approach – evolutionary, pull based. We implemented in different types of projects (huge business transformations, on going releases with existing customers), different scales (from 10 to 150 Person Years projects), different personas (the leaders, the laggers) and in a different manner (adapting the implementation to the specifics of our internal customers).
We will describe what it takes to make it work, and what obstacles we faced. we will share actual boards and reports helping the audience experience the scale, the challenge, the journey.
We will also share the story of the implementation in our first project – a mega project servicing a giant North American telecommunication service provider
In last year's research we looked at a few parameters that we could heuristically extract from the data that we already had. It was a great start primarily because it established our framework for quantitatively evaluating performance, however, the parameters we looked at only accounted for 7% of the variation in performance.
This year, we are now looking at 35 total variables and have a fully predictive model of performance based upon the team's context as well as their behaviors and practices. With this model, we can make context-sensitive recommendations to target improvement efforts. If last year's work was the first flight at Kitty Hawk, this year's is landing on the moon.
This session will be:
A presentation of general findings in our research correlating agile practices to performance along the dimensions of Productivity, Predictability, Quality, and Time-to-market. These can be used to make general decisions about what to focus on, however...
This session will also introduce you to the first-ever quantified decision framework for targeting improvement and making agile practice decisions. This fully-predictive model of performance that can be used to do “what-if” analyses to target improvement efforts, giving specific recommendations along with the likely results of the recommended changes.
The model is tailored for both context (age of codebase, regulatory needs, etc.) and economic model (i.e., quality is paramount for medical device manufacturers, but time-to-market is most critical for mobile apps). Recommendations are personalized to each team’s specific set of practices.
Best of all, no specific ALM tool is required to get these benefits. It’s agnostic. Any team will be able to take a survey on their practices and get concrete suggestions for immediate improvement.
Today’s complex projects need proactive risk management to stand any chance of executing successfully. Yet, all the steps of: identifying, classifying, analyzing and prioritizing in the world are for nothing if the risks cannot be effectively avoided, transferred, or reduced. Risk analysis, avoidance and reduction steps are largely human led activities with success criteria closely linked to social influence, communications and campaigning.
This session explains the need for proactive risk management through an examination of the “Flaw of Averages”, it walks through the risk management process examining traditional and lean/agile based processes. Then the importance of social influence in risk management is explored.
21st Century risk management should be a whole team activity facilitated by the project manager or risk analyst. Using case studies, a shared team approach to risk management is described. The framework leverages people’s strengths while optimizing the whole value stream. Through systemic analysis, collaborative games, new risk visualization techniques, and empowered teams, examples of risk analysis, risk avoidance and risk mitigation actions are examined.
We believe that better [M]easurement leads to better [I]nsight leads to better [D]ecisions leads to better [O]utcomes, but that you must start with the outcomes in mind (top-down) when designing a metrics regime lest you focus on metrics that don't maximize your chances of achieving the outcomes that matter most. That's why we call this concept ODIM instead of MIDO.
We also know that if you emphasize one metric (say Productivity), then performance in some other area(s) will suffer (Quality, Customer Satisfaction). I've been using this concept of balance for some time: Do it fast, Do it well, Do it when expected, Keep doing it. But I've also been adding a fifth "quadrant" that I've named "Do the right thing". This last one is very hard to measure.
This workshop will start with everyone putting on the table the metrics that you use (bottom up). Then we'll describe the dimensions that we think need to be covered (top-down). Placing the raw metrics into this dimensions and looking for gaps. The work that follows will attempt to fill in those gaps.
In 2013-2014 several big enterprises were trying a different style of change initiative. Inspired by the Kanban Method, Crossing the Chasm market thinking and pull-based based change, they are running a more open, collaborative and evolutionary style of change initiative that is a better fit for the complexity and legacy-ridden environments that they are.
As a follow up to our track session about the Amdocs Delivery Kanban Initiative case study, in this interactive workshop we will discuss patterns we used in this and similar situations such as “Manager’s first”, “Document/Methodology later”, “Market & wait for Pull”, “Case Study”, “Mandate vs Opt-in”, “Guidebooks OVER guided tours”. We will elaborate on the experience from case studies like Amdocs Delivery (also presented as a Kanban track case study) as well as seek similar experiences from the audience to try and identify common themes and future directions for experimentation/evolution of the approach. As a panel of the practitioners working with these patterns we will field questions like “How would you approach this scenario?” and others using a fishbowl session format.
Customer Development is the core of Lean Startup, and it is probably the least understood part of it all. We are notoriously bad at interviewing customers, yet alone finding them. How do the practices and metrics differ if we are a B2C startup or a B2B enterprise organization?
In this interactive workshop, we’ll walk through Customer Discovery and Customer Validation practices to generate awareness of our confirmation biases. We’ll learn how to screen for the right customer segment and then how to interview without pitching our solution or asking closed ended questions. Afterwards we’ll practice theming our feedback to generate insights for future experiments.
We'll also introduce quantitative and qualitative metrics to help you determine whether or not you’ve validated your assumptions. We’ll wrap up with some insightful Q&A around using these practices in both startups and large enterprise organizations.
A bold claim: “Improving project performance begins with increasing the predictability of workflow. Efforts to improve project performance by increasing productivity or reducing activity durations often make matters worse.” This session supports this counterintuitive claim with a simulation based on an example and story in Goldratt’s book “The Goal”.
The "Parade of Trades" explores how the compounding effects of dependence and variation reduce system performance. “Parade” is a simple exercise played in “weeks”. 35 Units of work are moved through 7 “Trades” by rolling a die. We will set up, run and then process the simulation by examining results, the consequence of moving bottlenecks, the alternatives available in traditional management, and the power of rapid learning in the Last Planner® System and Kanban.
The Elegant Set is a facilitated exercise that is especially useful when an organization is under pressure to deliver a solution or to implement a strategy, and it is caught in a cycle of endless debate driven by deep irreconcilable differences among a large group of key stakeholders. This methodology is a way to move a group forward by tapping into the collective intelligence of the group to quickly identify workable common ground.
This exercise is also useful for identifying the critical few drivers for success in a large or very complex project. These leading indicators are often powerful tools that provide a common frame of reference for gauging and guiding the progress of work in time-sensitive projects.
How we frame business, product, and market make all the difference in our power to make a difference for our customers and shareholders—or get a startup idea to the light of day. In this workshop, we’ll try a new way to understand what’s really going on between a business and market.
Let’s see business as a facilitator of value exchange: a business exists precisely as value flows between its stakeholders and through its systems. By understanding these Value Dynamics, we understand what a business actually is—or could be. We can quickly see the indirect multipliers and limiters in the whole system of value, and thus know what we must change to get results. Using simple methods of analysis, entrepreneurs and product owners iteratively develop a structure to manage a growing understanding of their business or product as it relates to a market. As such, we can organize learnings from Lean approaches like Customer Development and Product/Market Fit—and zero in on precisely where next to best apply those approaches. This complements other structures like Business Model Canvas. If we go broad instead of deep, Value Dynamics Analysis can also be used to rapidly explore existing or brainstormed industries, markets, and competitors.
We’ll take 90 minutes to run through some simple exercises to model stakeholders and how value flows between them. You can apply the exercises to your own business—real or imagined. It’s fun and eye-opening!
Read more about Value Dynamics Analysis—and our journey of discovery—at value-dynamics.co/ .
On the surface, capturing cycle time and throughput metrics seems easy in a Kanban system or tool. For accurate forecasting and decision-making using this data, we better be sure it is captured accurately and free of contaminated samples. For example, the cycle time or throughput rate for a project team working nights and weekends may not be the best data for forecasting the next project. Another choice we have to make is how we handle large and small outlier samples (extreme high or low). These extreme values may influence a forecast in a positive or negative direction, but which way?
Are you interested in experimenting with Cost of Delay, but not sure how to get started? This workshop is for you! To get the most out of it, you’ll need to bring along an idea, feature or project of your own for which you want to better understand the Cost of Delay.
When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. We’ve heard people say this too. And yet, in hindsight, people find it much easier than they thought! We will talk about how to get started with using Cost of Delay, despite these doubts.
The first step is to understand the value. To help structure the conversation we will use a simple economic framework to surface the assumptions behind your gut-feel about the value and priority. The second step is to understand the urgency. We will consider different possible urgency curves to help us determine how value decays over time. Doing each of these helps us to question and better understand what we feel about value and urgency. The truth is: we can’t have it all, and at the very least we need to decide where to start.
To make this real, together we will look at a real potential feature for a real company. You’ll work in pairs and see if you can take a stab at estimating the value and how that might decay over time, stating the assumptions you’ve made to arrive at a Cost of Delay. We will the compare results in small groups of less than 10 and use this to refine our assumptions and Cost of Delay range. Lastly, we will compare between groups and try to understand where the differences lie.
Then the fun starts! Maybe this won’t work, but we’re going to have a go with some of the ideas, features and projects you have brought with you. At the very least we will hopefully surface some of the assumptions about where the value lies and perhaps some small increment you could build in order to learn more about what the value might be. At the end of the session we’d really like for you to be able to go back to your organisation better armed with an understanding of the value and urgency for your idea, feature or project.
We’re still learning about this… so, to wrap up we’re going to ask you to do a mini-retrospective about what you’ve learned and what your puzzles are.
Every enterprise wants to develop software better, but adopting a methodology which fails to take into account your organization’s context, culture, and regulatory or legacy obligations is usually too risky. Too radical a change too quickly, or the wrong change too forcefully, can drive a wedge between engineering and business. Complete or partial process failures compound themselves by demoralizing teams. Additionally, pushing too much standardization can result in a fragile, failure-prone organization.
All of the popular lean and agile methodologies offer valuable insights and are backed by real success stories, but no methodology can work when it is carelessly or dogmatically applied. In the enterprise, it isn’t enough to follow someone else’s playbook. You need a deeper understanding of the “why”—the theory behind the methodology—so you can identify and address the real impediments to agile in your environment, and craft targeted solutions with confidence.
During this interactive workshop our discussion will explore the practices and principles that drive continued improvement, and how they can be introduced gently to the organization. Not just technically, either. We’ll discuss how to bring “the business side”, executives, even sales fully on board with agile—and how to make real progress while you are waiting for them to come around.
Whether you’ve tried and stalled before, or you’re just getting started and apprehensive about the road ahead, this interactive workshop is for you. Come discuss ideas to achieve a better, safer, and ultimately more effective path to a lean and agile adoption that will stick!
Workshop Goals
Attendees will interactively explore the essential agile and lean principles needed to drive change at the enterprise level. Likely outcomes will be knowledge of creating an enterprise Kanban structure that is suitable for their organization.
