These are slides from the talk during the Agile By Example conference in Warsaw, Poland, Sep 15-16, 2011.

1. Don’t Start with Kanban!
Marcin Czenko
Eindhoven,The Netherlands

2. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
All team members received an
introductory Scrum training.
No prisoners in the teams.
Product Owners selected and
empowered.
Scrum Masters selected and
empowered.
Pilot project selected.
Scrum - steps you may need to take...

3. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
PO and the team received sufficient
coaching in writing User Stories,
estimating them and grooming the
Product Backlog.
Empowerment levels clearly defined.
The team members received sufficient
training and coaching in eXtreme
Programming engineering practices.
Informative workspace facilitated.
Developers directly involved in hiring.
Senior stuff trained in mentoring and
coaching.

4. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Common excuses

5. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
We cannot have Product Owners
authorised to decide about budget...

6. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
There is no way to give the team
appropriate space to work...

7. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
It is impossible for a developer to be
associated with one project only...

8. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
We have to keep the high reporting
level to senior management...

9. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
There is no budget for training and
coaching...

10. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
We cannot align our business with
Scrum...

11. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
KANBAN

12. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
It is a nice book.
“Product Owner role is an especially
egregious error that trivializes the problems
of product planning, product design, and
requirements analysis and hides them
behind a black-box role that encompasses
at least as much complexity as the
development part of software creation
process.”

13. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
“The Product Owner plays a crucial part not
only in bringing new products to life but also
in managing the product lifecycle. Having
one person in charge across releases
ensures continuity and reduces handoffs,
and it encourages long-term thinking.”
It is a nice book too!

14. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Workflow

15. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Design Code Review Test Deploy
Workflow

16. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Because there is a false perception that Kanban
is all about workflow, many organisations believe
they can avoid serious organisational changes by
only optimising their workflow.

17. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Organisation suffers from heavy
functional silos - heavy well-defined
workflow.
No functional silos
Two most popular cases

18. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Design Code Review Test Deploy
CASE 1: Functional silos

19. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Design Code Review Test Deploy
Introduce queues
Not Good Problem

20. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Design Code Review Test Deploy
Limit the queue sizes

21. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Design Code Review Test Deploy
Get Rid of the queues
= Perfect Flow

22. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
And what then ?

23. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
“Sequential development in a short
iteration does not work.”

24. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Cross-functional teams
Concurrent engineering
eXtreme Programming (Test Driven
Development, Continuous Integration, Pair
Programming, etc).
Acceptance Test Driven Development
Heavy stuff :)

25. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Which means you will have to get through
all this Scrum/XP stuff first anyway before
you can proceed to a more Lean process.

26. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
For many, however, functional silos is not
an issue (ie. they don't have them). So they
could start right from the start, right ?
They don't...
CASE 2: No functional silos

27. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Instead they start something best named
SrumBUT or KanBUT

28. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Introduction of the sequential
workflow in a potentially cross-
functional teams.
Even though there is
no functional silos
issue.
KanBUT #1

29. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
This might be a step back.
KanBUT #1 - consequences
By not working for short sprints,
sequential engineering demonstrates its
limited efficiency, which means that
further improvement will be significantly
limited.

30. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Multiple access points to the team.
No Product Owner.
No Scrum Master.
KanBUT #2

31. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Stakeholders are going directly to the
team members.
KanBUT #2 - consequences
Tight relation between a developer and a
stakeholder leads to further specialization
of the developer.

32. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
A group of engineers sitting in their proximity
but actually working independently from each
other.
KanBUT #2 - consequences
No code ownership.
It is not important who is doing the job
but that the job is being done at a right
time - this can be fully explored only in
cross-functional teams.

33. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Because there is no team, someone has to
synchronise that.Team Leads will feel very
happy.
KanBUT #2 - consequences

34. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Lots of Work In Progress.
KanBUT #3

35. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
One developer may be working on only one
story but looking at the whole system there are
multiple changes happening at the same time.
KanBUT #3 - consequences
Conflict resolution.

36. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
More and more technical debt.
KanBUT #3 - consequences
Lower and lower internal quality.
WAY DOWN TO HELL.

37. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Experienced/senior members/architects
are the source of impediments.
KanBUT #4
Afraid of being useless.
They may try to convince you that a
deeper reorganization is a bad idea.

38. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Often THEY ARE USELESS: their only activity is to
keep themselves busy in an everlasting sequence of
meetings so that it looks to everyone they do not have
time.They are always busy and under strong time-
pressure.
Be understanding.Training/coaching in
mentoring is the thing.They can be great
coaches and mentors for less
experienced members.
KanBUT #4

39. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
If the organisation would satisfy some
standard Scrum constraints, most probably
they would be able to avoid most of the
problems mentioned.
Observation

40. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Conclusions

41. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Because there is a perception that Kanban is
all about workflow, organisations blindly
believe that by hanging a Kanban board they
can bypass heavy organisational changes.

42. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Avoid introducing a sequential
workflow to your engineering process.
It is a step backward...

43. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Do use ATDD and eXtreme
Programming for shortest cycle time.

44. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Don't forget that well-implemented
Kanban is Lean.

45. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Scrum can help you getting there.

46. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
All these "horrible" constraints that
Scrum puts on your organisation is a
safety net that protects you.
Use it...

47. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Most of the organisations we saw (and we
saw quite a number of them) are not doing
Scrum well. If you cannot adopt Scrum it may
be just unrealistic to expect magic from
Kanban.

48. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Functional
Silos
Cross-functional
feature teams
2 weeks
SCRUM
Kanban
Use Kanban here if
necessary
Towards a Lean process...

49. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Final Conclusion

50. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Start with Scrum

51. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Refactor to
Kanban
(or just Lean)

52. Agile By Example, Warsaw, 15-16 September 2011Marcin Czenko
Acknowledgements
Quantum of Value Ltd.

53. Thank you !
Marcin Czenko
Eindhoven,The Netherlands