Innovation at scale doesn’t happen by accident. And it isn’t magic, either. How can we encourage innovation and at all levels, ensuring that insights and findings are incorporated into organizational strategy so that we can react and adjust quickly — enabling true business agility? Discovery Kanban and Human Centered Design provide the keys to understanding our customers and managing R&D efforts to ensure we build the right things. In turn, Kanban flight levels provides a rich and robust framework to align these activities across the organization—connecting organizational strategy (at flight level three) down to the efforts of individual teams of knowledge workers (at flight level one).
In this session we will explore how the combination of Discovery Kanban, HCD, and Kanban Flight Levels give us a vocabulary and a rich set of tools to visualize and manage customer-centered innovation efforts at scale. We will start out by reviewing Kanban boards that are used by individual teams to manage their work—at flight level one. We will see how each team’s discovery or delivery efforts are beautifully visualized by Kanban so that they can be integrated and managed effectively. We will then proceed up to flight level two and see how Kanban boards at this level help coordinate multiple inter-dependent discovery and delivery teams. Finally, we will see how a flight level three board captures organizational strategy, tying strategic objectives to both current and future initiatives—that are in turn tracked on flight level one and two boards.
Kanban provides the alternative path to agility: a humane, evolutionary approach that works both within and outside of IT. The combination of HCD, Discovery Kanban, and Kanban flight levels provides a powerful, effective and low-overhead method for achieving true business agility.
6. Context: Online Learning Company
qMission: Help K-8 Students to love and excel at Math
qPrimary school lessons in production Now
qUsers nearly 1/3 of all US Students
qExtending into Elementary and Secondary School Grades
qDelivery: Roughly one grade-worth of material per calendar year
7. Key Differentiators
qExtremely High-Quality Lessons
qVast Amount of Content
qUncovering new ways to teach and simplify complex concepts
qGamification and making learning fun
qCreating Growth mindset: “I can learn this”
8. Challenges and Pain Points
qSome items over-specified with full UX, others under-specified bare bones
lots of questions
qLarge amounts of “hidden” work uncovered in the middle of development
necessitated replanning
qUrgent items crop up causing already in-progress items to be bypassed and
ultimately, they get stale
qSmall “punchlist” items not addressed, so we never actually finish since we
are already working on the next big thing
qDelays cause ripple effect of replanning since many different teams involved
in scheduling production “shoots”
qLeadership pulled into low-level decision-making, reducing time for strategic
thinking and risking executive burnout
9. Challenges and Pain Points
No agile strategic
portfolio
management
No end-to-end
management of
the value streams
Few agile
Interactions
between teams
10. Challenges and Pain Points
No agile strategic
portfolio
management
• Developers do not know “source” of requirements
• Unclear how an individual user story “advances the ball” (relates to the
strategy)
• Work items not tied into portfolio items
• Not clear how defects or latent requirements affect overall deadlines
• Hard to make trade-off analysis
No end-to-end
management of
the value streams
Few agile
Interactions
between teams
11. Challenges and Pain Points
No agile strategic
portfolio
management
• Developers do not know “source” of requirements
• Unclear how an individual user story “advances the ball” (relates to the
strategy)
• Work items not tied into portfolio items
• Not clear how defects or latent requirements affect overall deadlines
• Hard to make trade-off analysis
No end-to-end
management of
the value streams
• Developers unaware of operational concerns (stability, scalability
concerns)
• Limited developer input in design decisions
• Schedule and cost Implications of design alternatives unclear
• Larger missions languish at “90% complete”
• Schedule pressure leads to constantly starting work on new missions
Few agile
Interactions
between teams
12. Challenges and Pain Points
No agile strategic
portfolio
management
• Developers do not know “source” of requirements
• Unclear how an individual user story “advances the ball” (relates to the
strategy)
• Work items not tied into portfolio items
• Not clear how defects or latent requirements affect overall deadlines
• Hard to make trade-off analysis
No end-to-end
management of
the value streams
• Developers unaware of operational concerns (stability, scalability
concerns)
• Limited developer input in design decisions
• Schedule and cost Implications of design alternatives unclear
• Larger missions languish at “90% complete”
• Schedule pressure leads to constantly starting work on new missions
Few agile
Interactions
between teams
• Development may start too early (designs half-baked) or too late (many
designs already completed)
• Dependencies uncovered late
• Teams unaware of or not prioritizing external dependencies
13. Development Teams
q Started with Scrum
q Using Pivotal Tracker
q Sprints not working well
§ significant unplanned work
§ Significant Fixed-date work
§ Significant coordination with other specialist teams (academics, video production, instructional designers)
16. Selected Approach to Agile Transformation
What To Do
(Overall Framework)
Flight Levels &
Discovery Kanban
How To Establish it
Systems Thinking Approach to
Implementing Kanban (STATIK)
How to Evolve It
(Approach, Specific
Practices)
Kanban Maturity Model
17. Transformational Dos and Don’ts
Not This
§ Change the Organizational Structure
Immediately
§ Focus on Team-Level Agile
§ Start with a Tool
§ Scale too Quickly
This
• Engage Top Management as Active
Participants
• Understand Context and Challenges
• Design Flight Level Architecture
• Implement One FL2 System
• Connect to FL3 Strategy Level
• Replicate Service by Service
• Start simple
• Evolve over time
20. Drastic Change Programs Are Risky
Safety!
Patience!
time
Capability
Failure!
Lower maturity
organizations panic
under stress
Kanban in action!
Avoid the failure mode
of large scale, designed &
managed transitions
18% success*
18% failure
64%
moderately
effective
* https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/organizational-change-management.pdf
24. Driving Evolutionary Change
Actively influence decisions
and actions of leaders at all
levels.
Leadership
e.g. Lead by example:
demonstrate desired
behaviors
Engage people emotionally
and provoke an impulse to
‘do something about it’.
Stressor e.g. WIP limits or triage
Hold a mirror up to reality:
Needed to catalyse the
demand for further change.
Reflection
Mechanism
e.g. Kanban cadences,
metrics or charts, F4P
surveys
…applying just enough stress to catalyze improvement.
28. • Even though teams are delivering, overall delivery is slow
• Many issues show up late, during integration
• Performance, scalability, and usability problems persist
• Team-level improvements can actually make the situation worse
Team-Level Agile: What’s Missing?
Team 3
Team 2
Team 1
Team 4
Team 3
Team 2
Team 1
Team 2
Team 1
36. Flight Level 3: Strategy
qBig Picture
qTeams in Purple
qNeed to coordinate?
Blue
qStrategy ties value
streams to mission,
annual goals, OKRs
37. Example Flight Level Three (Strategy) Visualization
Strategy /
Objective KR / KPI
MVP: Support
Initial Disability
Claims for 1
medium
MicroPact state
Initial Adult
disability claim
can be entered
Financial API
produces JSON
Business
Function
Capabilities
Manage
User Profile
Manage
Organization
Manage
Authorizations
Interface to State
Financial Systems
Manage
Disability Case
Manage
Disability Claim
Manage
Authentication
3-6 Months 0-3 Months Active
Basic User
Info
Basic Org
Info
Assign Org
Roles
Manage Org
Users
User
Login
User
Logout
Impersonate
User
Manage User
Relationships
User Financial
Info
38. Flight Level Three (Strategy) Visualization
§ Ties strategy to execution
§ Simplifies trade-off analysis
§ Facilitates Hypothesis-Driven
Development (HDD)
§ Enables Business Agility
39. STATIK
Systems Thinking Approach to Implementing Kanban
qAnalyze your services one at a time
qDesign a Kanban system
qKanban systems exist at all three levels
qRinse and Repeat
44. Next Step: Selecting A tool
Goals
qFlexible Board Design
qMulti-Level Boards
qColorful and Informative Tickets
qEasy and Actionable Metrics
qFacilitates Collaboration
qAbility to Fix Misteaks Mistakes
Non-Goals
qIntegration with Source Code Control
46. Problems and Solutions
Few Agile
Interactions
Between Teams
Flight Levels & Capacity Tokens
§Flight Level Two Integration Board
§Limit WIP at Integration Level
§Use CapTokens to facilitate coordination of dependencies
No end-to-end
management of the
value streams
Flight Levels & Discovery Kanban
§Extend our integration board to cover workflow before and after Dev
§After acceptance testing, what steps remain to actually deliver to the
customer?
§Before backlog refinement, what steps are required to get requirements ready?
No agile strategic
portfolio
management
Flight Levels & Discovery Kanban
§Portfolio level board helps us plan and manage our initiatives
§Marries our roadmap with portfolio management
§Quantify our progress against strategic goals with OKRs
47. Key Takeaways
§ Most Agile Transformations are not successful
§ Making Agile Teams Does Not Produce Business Agility
§ Large Changes are Risky: Evolutionary Change Works Better
§ Flight Level Framework is Lightweight and yet Comprehensive
§ Kanban Maturity Model Provides Blueprint for Successful Evolutionary
Change
48. Coaching/Training Courses
Atlassian Suite
1. Jira Fundamentals
2. Jira Intermediate
3. Jira Advanced
4. Team Spaces in Confluence
5. Git and Bitbucket
Technical Practices
1. Specification By Example
2. BDD & Automated Acceptance Testing
3. Git and GitHub
4. Hands-On DevSecOps w/Docker
5. Microservices Design Patterns
6. SRE: Site Reliability Engineering
7. AI/ML Bootcamp
Agile Transformation
1. Fundamentals of Agile
2. Agile for Leaders & Executives
3. Human Centered Design
4. Agile Requirements: Story Mapping,
Splitting & Discovery Kanban
5. Agile Forecasting & Metrics
6. Digital Transformation with Flight Levels
Agile Certifications
1. Team Kanban Practitioner
2. Kanban Management Professional
3. Kanban Maturity Model
4. SAFe Scrum Master / Adv SM
5. SAFe Product Owner
6. SAFe Release Train Engineer