Lots of organizations nowadays are determined to become more agile. Naturally. They have to adapt to an environment in which customers are demanding short time delivery, better quality, capability to deal with changes to requirements, higher productivity and lower costs. However, many companies are struggling with the change from manage&control working processes to Agile (typically Scrum) or Lean.
This change is hard! It requires a great involvement not only from the development or operations team but from the rest of the organization as well. It is not about substituting practices with different ones or simply shortening the iterations. It is rather a mindset change: shifting the focus from accomplishing individual assignments to delivering customer value as a team; from following a plan to satisfying changing requirements, and achieving uninterrupted workflow without overloading people.
The experience that I will share is mainly from CMMI and ISO 9001 organizations working in the software system development and in the industrial engineering fields. However, I would expect to see the same challenges in other companies with rather classic hierarchical culture. Therefore, my purpose with this presentation is to introduce powerful Kanban tools that can help such organizations
- Get higher visibility in the ongoing work, improve predictability and customer satisfaction (project/service level)
- Get to have light, not bureaucratic, and sustainable processes that allow faster delivery; and if needed, keep meeting certification requirements (process level)
- Create and maintain the culture of continuous improvement. (team level)
The presentation is oriented to people who are involved or leading initiatives that aim at increasing the agility and the efficiency of their organizations independently on the application domain. Some basic knowledge of Kanban would be helpful to avoid introducing fundamental concepts.
