For years Agile practices and methodologies have failed to adequately address legitimate management concerns: prioritization, dependencies, meaningful metrics, forecasting, and aligning specialist functions to deliver what customers request. Within the Kanban Method and the lesser-known Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) body of practices there are well-established solutions that have helped managers overcome these chronic problems. ESP is a collection of advanced practices to reach and maintain high levels of fitness-for-purpose. However there are simplified versions, based on the validated practices, than any Agile manager can use. We will look at one set of practices to address the dependencies pain point from a case study. Agile’ s answer to dependencies has been to ‘thin slice’ or to ‘put all dependent skills in the same team.’ It’s answer to prioritization is ‘place responsibility on one person’ or ‘force stack ranking’ or ‘just do the weighted, shortest job first’. Agile metrics are not KPIs – doubling velocity would not be an improvement. For forecasting, it’s mostly smoke and mirrors with very low reliability. We will frankly look at why these popular Agile solutions don’t help managers. Then we will look simple approaches any manager can implement based on Kanban and ESP practices and how it overcomes these pain points. As a coach you will be prepared to learn more about how to start tackling these chronic issues for good. As a manager you will hear answers to your burning questions and know where to start looking for better help.

1. Kanban’s
Established Solutions for
Chronic Agile Pain Points
Help Specific Problems with Things We’ve Been Doing for Years
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LKCE 2019
Hamburg
Steve McGee
CEO DJA School of
Managment

2. Agenda
• A sincere question
• A brief reminder of the Kanban Method approach to change
• A look at one chronic pain point Agile still struggles to relieve
• A brief survey of some other pain points
• At least one conclusion
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3. Thousands of people
know about Kanban.
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4. How many of them know
all we can do for them?
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5. How do we get
their interest?
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6. How do we get
their interest?
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7. Transitioning &
Consolidating Practices
Let’s look briefly at one aspect of the Kanban Maturity Model
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8. Each Maturity Level Has Two Sides
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• Willingness
Let’s do something about it!

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Who is willing to ‘do something about it’?
https://twitter.com/davidjbland/status/559792909659029504

11. Advice from Customer Development friends:
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Start with understanding
the Problem Space first.
(What are the Pain Points?)
Sam MacAfee et al

12. A Pain Point
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13. Dependencies
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14. How does Agile deal
with dependencies?
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15. Change things so one team
doesn’t have to rely on another.
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• Imperfect organizational design based on component teams ( "bus
team", "analytics team", "Android Team", “integration team”). It
causes intensive fragmentation.
• Incomplete cross-functionality (lack of one or more skills).
• Unreasonable complicated architectural design ( f.e. "there are 256
systems in our organization"), which inhibits creation of cross-
component and cross-functional Scrum Teams.
ILLIA Pavlichenko
Scrum.org: Why Dependencies Exist

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Put all the skills you’ll ever
need in the same team
Scrum

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Fly everyone to the same
place for two days –
and bring miles of string.
SAFe

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Thin, vertical slices!
XP

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• Can you have a perfect organization design?
• Does your service have 100% authority to make decisions?
• Think about design, usability, marketing, support. Customer delivery
depends on start-to-finish, end-to-end flow. Vertical slicing is myopic.
Is this realistic?

23. Kanban Approach to
Dependencies
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24. Basic Kanban Practices and Tools:
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• Swim Lanes
• Capacity Allocation
• Class of Service
Reduce the Risk of Delays

25. Observed
Capability
Demand
Customer Facing
Application Services
Internal Facing
Platform Services
Observed
Capability
Demand
Calling
Service
Called
Service
Calling vs. Called Service
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26. Observed
Capability
Demand
Service A
Service B
Observed
Capability
Demand
Calling
Service
Called
Service
(6)
(3)
Capacity Allocation
Called Service Can “Do Something About It”
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BestDay Results:
Called Service
Unilaterally Implemented
Capacity Allocation and
Improved Fitness Criteria
of Client

28. 5 4 43 2 2
...Input
Queue
Dev
Ready In Prog DoneDoneIn Prog
DevelopmentAnalysis Build
Ready Test
Release
Ready
Waiting on
External Group
Late against SLA
Dots denote clock
ticking on SLA
∞8
Unbounded
Queue
When the called service
becomes reliable &
predictable, we can calculate
a WIP limit for the
dependency buffer
Calling Service Can “Do Something About It”
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29. Other Pain Points
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30. Priorities
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31. Do you struggle to name
and maintain priorities?
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32. Don’t prioritize – Filter!
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33. Estimation or Forecasting
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34. Do you struggle to
forecast delivery dates?
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35. Don’t look into the crystal ball –
look at the record!
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36. Metrics
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37. Do your metrics reveal
risk and actionable data?
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38. Ask what customers care about!
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39. How do we get
their interest?
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40. How do we earn
their trust?
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Earn trust: demonstrate
you understand the intent,
the desired outcome.
Steve McGee

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Earn trust: demonstrate
you understand the intent,
the desired outcome.
Steve McGee

43. Define the customer’s problem
and tell a story of how you will
help them solve it.
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44. djaa.com/lkce
Special offer for the conference:
30% off registration by the end of November
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45. About
Steve McGee has 30 years of experience in
leadership and organization development, from
developing programs that teach leadership and
develop character, to creating, implementing and
supervising staff training for leadership schools.
Steve drives the development of programming and runs the
David J Anderson School of Management. He is a co-author
of the 2nd edition KMM book and developer of the
Leadership extensions to the Kanban Maturity Model.
He is co-author of The Silicon Valley Way, to help Japanese
businesses implement innovation management practices to
increase business agility.
Steve is former president and director of events of the Bay
Area Organization Development Network, and founding
member of the Association of Change Management
Professionals.
He teaches courses in Seattle, Bilbao, and at customer sites.
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