Lean Agile Management Podcast

"Starting work doesn't generate value, starting work only costs money. Finishing work generates value." - Klaus Leopold First, there was personal productivity. Then, everyone started talking about Agile teams. Today, it's time to take it even higher. In this episode of the Lamp, we are talking about business alignment with Klaus Leopold. Klaus is an experienced computer scientist and a well-known Kanban pioneer - he was one of the first Lean Kanban trainers and coaches worldwide. He is the author of books Practical Kanban, Kanban in IT and co-author of Kanban Change Leadership. Today on the podcast, Klaus is sharing with us his passion for establishing lean business agility that goes beyond teams. Business alignment and coordination might be one of the biggest challenges any leader faces. In this episode, you'll learn how to enable your teams and your whole organization to do the right work at the right time using the concept of Flight Levels. Team performance vs Business Agility We often think we need to have agile teams in our business so they would deliver projects faster. But that's the wrong lever. What should we optimize in business to speed up the overall delivery time? How to take the right decisions on the right levels. Individual performance vs Team performance vs Company performance Understanding the difference between team Kanban and Portfolio Kanban When you fly high, you don't see much detail. When you fly low, you can't see the bigger picture How to ensure the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time How to optimize cross-team collaboration for value delivery The impact of levers you can use is greater at higher levels of your organization. But if the lever doesn't solve your problem, it doesn't matter how strong it is. Business agility is not about the power of the lever. It's not about the performance of individuals, not about team performance, not even about product performance. It's all about company performance. First, company, then products, then teams, then individuals. But it's the company that has to improve. Contact with our guest: Twitter LinkedIn

Welcome to Lean Agile Management Podcast - a place where we talk with the thought leaders and top-tier management consultants about Lean Agile transformation, answer manager’s questions and discuss the hottest topics in management & productivity. Welcome to the LAMP! Are you tired of putting out the fires of your team issues just to see them cycle back? If so, you might be extinguishing the symptoms instead of eliminating the root cause of your problems. Today we will shine the light on building and sustaining the culture of the continuous improvement process and how this key concept of Lean philosophy can help you solve the team management issues. We are joined today by a professional Lean coach, developer of Kanban foundation courses, and a certified service management consultant, Robert Falkowitz. Today he is tuning in from Switzerland to talk with us about continuous improvement in the context of team management. Skip to Comments > Video Transcript: D: Hi Robert, welcome to the show! R: Hi Dima, thanks for inviting me. How are you today? D: I’m doing great, how are you? R: Good, very well. D: I’m glad you could make it, thanks for tuning in today. R: It’s my pleasure. D: So I know you have really serious experience helping teams understand and implement Lean and Kanban, you’ve worked with countless teams in different industries but why did you decide to coach Lean in the first place? Could we start there? R: Before I got involved in Lean and Kanban in a very serious way, I did a lot of work in Service Management. What I’ve found and what most people in the field find is that it’s very difficult to justify the effort that you put into the improving the way in which you manage services. And I found that the reason for this was that most organizations have problems in the way in which they deliver and manage services; not because of the Service Management aspect but because of something much more fundamental: how their teams are organized and how they manage their work, how they manage the flow of work or don’t manage the flow of work, for that matter. R: And so, I said, in order to be able to help my customers better, it was important to help them improve where you could make most noticeable improvements and then afterward we can come back and fine-tune it with Service Management improvements. And that’s how I got started with Lean and Kanban. D: Would you say there are some general patterns or issues in the way we think about team management that the teams you’ve been working with could share? R: You know, there are a lot of differences from one sector to another sector, especially in terms of regulatory requirements. There will be differences in terms of the size of the organization, whether they are located at one site or multiple sites. There are differences in terms of the background, the culture of the organization and how it works. So every case is somewhat different and you have to be agile in adapting to services that you provide in order to help organizations do a better job at doing their work. D: Would you say that there are some biggest ultimate roadblocks or productivity myths that specifically prevent teams from becoming a high performing team? Well, what I’ve found is when organizations try to improve the way in which they work by layering on more controls, what they’re doing is fact, very frequently, exactly the opposite of what they intend to do. Now, it is difficult because people have grown up in believing that the best way to improve the way in which they work is to manage better, to check up more, to control more, to have better reports and to be able to act better on those reports in order to make decisions. And very frequently this is exactly the opposite of what the organizations need to do. So you’ve got this big change in the mentality of people, trying to get them to think in terms of doing less in order to improve the way in which they perform, rather than doing more.

"You want happy staff. You become more productive as the manager because you don't have to deal with the hassles." - Judy Rees Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we're talking to Judy Rees about effective communication in complex environments to learn how to improve team communication at work using a method called Clean Language. From the famous feedback sandwich to the Nonviolent Communication method, managers everywhere are eager to find an effective way to overcome the communication hurdles of a modern workplace. Different cultural backgrounds, distributed and remote teams make it even harder for contributors and managers to communicate effectively. Having poor communication in teams leads to misunderstandings and conflicts. Insufficient or ineffective communication is reported to have a direct effect on employee engagement, high employee turnover, and can even be the reason behind missed goals. Together, all these side effects lead to stress and anxious people are even harder to communicate with. Sounds like a vicious circle, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great, if we could just glimpse into someone else's mind and just see why they do things the way they do? See what kind of meanings hide behind the words people say. The answer you’re looking for might be the Clean Language method. To understand what that is and how to use it, we’ve invited Judy Rees - a public speaker, trainer, and consultant as well as a co-author of a bestselling book called Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds. Clean Language is a method initially devised by David Grove to help therapy clients explore their inner thoughts. In essence, it’s a very specific precision inquiry technique that’s built on the idea of probe request and response. The ultimate goal is to find out what it is that somebody really means by what they're saying even when they don't know themselves. The key points covered in the episode: The biggest challenge for modern management How to communicate effectively in highly unstable and complex environments Boosting team morale, company profits, and manager’s well-being with good communication What is Clean Language and how can it help you deal with business challenges? Giving feedback and understanding problematic employees Importance of effective communication (listening) skills in conflict resolution How to learn what's necessary for people to work at their best. Further Reading: “How to create a collaborative culture?” “Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors And Opening Minds” - book by Judy Rees How Do Agile Practitioners Benefit From Learning Clean Language? “From Contempt to Curiosity” - book by Caitlin Walker Shared leadership and self-organized teams Contact our guest: LinkedIn Twitter Website

"If from your strategy you can't identify anything that you would say no to, it's probably not a good strategy." - Karl Scotland Strategy Execution is Hard. Creating Strategy is Even Harder. Are you struggling with too many conflicting priorities? Constantly dealing with short-term unachievable targets that only send the whole team into a total burnout without any real result? You are not alone. Developing a strategy that leads to a successful execution is one of the biggest issues managers report to struggle with today. As revealed in a survey by PwC’s Strategy, which involved 2,800 executives from companies of various sizes, geographies, and industries, 82% of executives say that growth initiatives companies do commit to lead to at least partial waste. Converting strategic decisions into specific actions, allocating resources to support the success of the strategy, achieving an alignment of the day-to-day activities with the bigger objectives and strategic initiatives - all of these are the challenges managers and executives face every day. In this context, how can a leader build a successful strategy that would make sense at every level of business? Unfortunately, as stated in the same survey, almost half of the executives in question decided not to set a specific action at all - 49% stated their company has no list of strategic priorities. Is having no strategy really an answer? How to Build and Execute a Strategy to Get Real Results Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we are looking for a definitive answer to Lean-Agile strategy execution with Karl Scotland. Karl is a Strategy Deployment expert and a professional Lean and Agile consultant, who helped clients like BBC, Yahoo, Cisco, and others. In this episode: How to create an end-to-end alignment of tasks, tactics, initiatives, and strategy? How to give autonomy while avoiding a total chaos and unpredictability in execution? How to use feedback to prevent second-guessing, deadly misunderstandings and unalignment? Who is responsible for creating the strategy? What, who and how comes up with the tactics and tasks? How to execute strategy with a focus on true business benefits? TASTE True North Aspirations Strategy Tactics Evidence Using Hoshin Kanri X matrics to visualize the strategy and related work Future backward exercise as a tool for breaking boxed thinking, draw out How get people to buy-into the strategic ideas? Continuous strategy and tactics adjustment and evaluation. How do we know our strategy is (not) working? Failure is absolutely necessary to a strategic success, Why everyone needs to learn to fail Further reading and mentioned resources: What is A3 problem-solving? Understanding Lean model of shared leadership Catchball as a tool for strategic feedback collection What is Hoshin Kanri X matrix? Free downloadable templates of X Matrix and A3's by Karl Scotland Book Recommendations by Karl Scotland: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Playing to Win Art of Action Turn the Ship Around Future Backwards Guest Details: Twitter | LinkedIn | AvailAgility LAMP or (Lean Agile Management Podcast) is a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

“Kanban scales in a way that does not require bureaucracy and brings coherence to all the actions in the company, because it is clear how decisions are made at all levels. “ Teodora Bozheva In this episode of the LAMP, we are talking about project, program, and portfolio management with Kanban with Teodora Bozheva. Teodora is an experienced Kanban consultant and one of the brightest minds in the Kanban community. She is an Accredited Kanban Trainer and Consultant with more than 15 years of experience leading organizational change initiatives. Teodora is the founder and CEO of Berriprocess Agility. A company that provides training and guides you in the evolution of your project and service management practices, as well as your organizational culture. Teodora is also a co-author of Kanban Maturity Model: A Map to Organizational Agility, Resilience, and Reinvention and author of The Complete Guide for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management with Kanban. In this episode, we discuss: Can companies use Kanban for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management? What types of companies use Kanban for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management? What makes Kanban suitable for different organizations? Can Kanban be scaled? What kind of challenges does Kanban solve? How do companies apply Kanban? Learn more about: The Complete Guide for Project, Program and Portfolio Management with Kanban Kanban Maturity Model: A Map to Organizational Agility, Resilience, and Reinvention Contact with our guest: LinkedIn Twitter