Portfolio Kanban: When It's Time to Scale Up

01/30/18 • 29 min

Is team Kanban really enough to achieve Business Agility? If you already practice Kanban, you are probably enjoying the visibility and efficiency it brings on the team level. However, the joys of having agility in a siloed team wear off quickly if the rest of the organization is inefficient and slow. The answer? Let me introduce you to Portfolio Kanban. Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we're talking about scaling Kanban to the organizational or the project portfolio level. Some like to say that Kanban is just for small teams. Our guest proves them wrong, as he works with groups as large as 1800 people. In this episode, you will learn how to apply Kanban end-to-end at the system level. We're talking today to Nader Talai, who is a professional IT manager, the organizer for the London Limited WIP Society and Business Agility Consultant at Value Glide. In this episode, he walked us through a range of hot topics about scaling Kanban to the portfolio level and making this a change that lasts. Here are the key questions we've covered: How to make Business Agility a change that lasts? Stop focusing on practices and labels, think about the outcomes and results you are trying to achieve using Kanban or any other tool. Nader tells us how to adopt Portfolio Kanban with the positive outcomes and lasting change in mind. What causes a high rate of expedite tasks and how to deal with them When your team is constantly putting out fires, you need to ask yourself what's the reason behind all of the expedite tasks? Nader walks us through the root cause behind the endless stream of "urgent" tasks. Is Kanban effective only for small teams? Myth or reality? What kind of teams can benefit from Kanban? How can we use Kanban on portfolio level? How to do less as an organization to achieve more? Is it possible to effectively limit work in progress on the organizational level? How to achieve work predictability at the portfolio level with Kanban Pull? The unexpected downsides of high resource utilization While it might seem like the most logical thing to do, aiming for 100% resource utilization (aka keeping everyone and everything busy) can be bad for your organization. We discussed how Portfolio Kanban lets us focus on and manage the Flow of work instead of simply keeping people busy. Kanban planning: how to set up realistic goals and expectations With all the great promises Agile and Lean worlds offer, you might be tempted to "account for it" in your goal setting process. Nader brings up the topic of setting up the right expectations in Kanban planning. Adopting Portfolio Kanban: how to get top management buy-in? Convincing stakeholders that changing the way teams or whole organizations work is not the easiest of tasks. In the interview, you'll learn how to get the top management buy-in for practicing Pull principle and Portfolio Kanban. Looking for more on the topic of Portfolio Kanban and scaling Kanban to the company level? Here are some useful resources on the topic: What is Portfolio Kanban? Implementing a Kanban Roadmap What are WIP limits and how to use them to boost productivity How to Set and Manage WIP Limits on Portfolio Level Understanding Pull Systems Did you find out something new? What should we ask our next guest and who should it be? Let us know down in the comments.

Previous Episode

Clean Language: #1 Way to Fix Poor Team Communication

"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

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Start managing work, stop managing people.

"Drucker said a long time ago: manage the work, not the workers." - Andy Carmichael What if there was an easier way to get started with Kanban? Yes, there are principles, systems, values, practices... But all you really want to know is how to get started now. If that's you, the Kanban Lens is for you. Today on the Lamp we are talking to Andy Carmichael about an easier way to make sense of Kanban and your work. Andy Carmichael is the UK Director of HUGE.IO, public speaker, coach, author and co-author of several books on agile software delivery and Kanban. In this episode, we asked Andy to help us see what Kanban really is at its core using a concept he helped to develop - the Kanban Lens. As the popularity of Kanban grows, so does the cloud of misconceptions and confusion around it. While many people will try convincing you that Kanban is better than Scrum (and vice versa), few can actually explain it in simple terms. In its essence, Kanban is a way to see and manage your flow of work. All it really asks you to do is look at your work in a different way. Kanban lens helps to summarize that in just four elements. Here is how to see your work through the Kanban Lens: See work as a flow - from customer need to needs met. Think of your work and a flow of value towards the customer - this puts the customer front and center, no matter if they are inside or outside of your organization. See workflow as a sequence of knowledge discovery steps - every work stage is there for us to learn something. Once we know enough, we deliver our finding. See knowledge work as a service - our instinct is to manage the things that are visible. This way we end up managing the people and not the work. Instead, think about your work as a service and manage it the same way. See organizations as a network of services - each service is interdependent inside an organization, so think about the end-to-end process. Among other things, here is what we've covered in this episode: How to get started with Kanban Viewing your organization through the Kanban lens Difference between kanban signaling technique and Kanban method for Knowledge work. Applicability of Kanban outside of IT and Software Development Being busy vs seeing work getting finished Applying the decades of work management findings to work today Taking Kanban to the organizational level Optimizing whole organization service by service How to promote a change that will stick Looking into the future In the end, Kanban is not a pre-canned solution. It's a tool that invites you to look at your work yourself and decide for yourself what needs to be changed. See what you're unhappy with, what your customer and your workers are unhappy with and your customers, your workers, start from there. Don't do what worked for someone else. Start where you are, make your work visible, make issues visible. You will then make the change that sticks, change things that are really broken, don't change things for change's sake. People need to know the reasons why things are done. Start from where you are and grow from there.