Bootstrapping Agile (by yourself) using Kanban - My Agile Israel 2013 talk

Agile Israel 2013 took place yesterday. This year was they year of “Hands on”. Around 600 attendees came to get practical hands on advice on multiple aspects of the agile world. My talk was about running your agile journey on your own.

This talk was aimed at people looking into agile or exploring ways to go agile for “group level” and above. I presented a mind map I recently created based on work I’ve been doing in the field the last 2 years and some experiences of other coaches on the AgileSparks team. I also mentioned some aspects of the recent and excellent Kanban Kick-Start Field Guide. 

I also experimented with a hybrid delivery approach for this session. I started with an Ignite/Pecha-Kucha style run through the 37 frames Prezi using 20 second auto-advance. Together with a short intro to what I’m going to do took about 10 minutes. Then I allowed serious time (something like 20 minutes) to deep dive of areas the session participants found especially interesting or unclear. This felt quite good as a speaker, and I got some good feedback from people in the audience, as well as some people who didn’t really like the session (red dots - no explanation why…)

The first question was about where how to choose which teams to start with, how to deal with different approaches for different teams, which was a good chance to explain my “Starting with Managers Kanban” approach in more depth - basically starting with value streams rather than component teams, then explore real value-stream/feature teams, then scale to more and more value-stream/feature teams as you grow your maturity, understanding. I think it is especially useful when exploring agile on your own, as it ensures the leads/managers are into it before you go into deep painful changes that are beyond your pain/skill threshold.

Second came up another one of my favorite challenges - how to make sure improvement happens. I took this opportunity to explore this area of the mind map in a bit more depth, basically addressing 3 key areas:

• The need for purpose/urgency (connecting the drivers for agility with relevant metrics)
• The need for clear actionable steps beyond just “improving” and “retrospecting” (here I described the concept of “boosts” to use the term coined by the Sandvik people in their great Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 talk as well as gave some examples like Maturity/Depth assessment, Learning about variability, Learning about bottlenecks and Theory of Constraints, Learning about Rightshifting and how to use it to energize further mindset shift.
• The lack of progress on identified improvement actions. Here I talked about Personal Kanban for leaders and management teams as a way to create discipline of execution and Improvement Kanban Board to make sure improvement actions are first-class citizens in your execution routine

BTW, readers interested in this topic are welcome to look at my Lean Systems and Software Conference 2012 talk - The Improvement Journey.

The last question we had time for was about my favorite visualizations. Kanban boards obviously. But I also talked about the Talent Matrix and how to use it to grow versatility in a way that is collaborative and inclusive. I also mentioned dependency boards and hierarchical kanbans that can be useful when applicable.

One of the questions people are asking me is obviously do I really believe people can bootstrap agile on their own with Kanban? My answer is that it obviously depends. If you have a great leadership team, the need and motivation for agility is clear, there is the ability to invest in learning on their own, the time to spare for experimenting and taking time to recover from wrong turns, then probably you can make it on your own, at least most of the time. Having someone who knows what they’re doing around can reduce risks, help recover faster from wrong turns, avoid some unnecessary mistakes. This provides some “risk management” as well as acceleration of the bootstrapping and improvement process. Note that even if a coach is involved I believe great coaching still leaves most of the work at the hands of the managers/leaders of the organization and still requires experimentation and evolution by people on the ground.

While obviously attending a 30 minutes session is not enough to make this happen (dear attendees, don’t expect a Certified Kanban Boostrapper title…)  I believe we can help change agents use this approach to bootstrap agile in their organizations. If you want to learn more about this approach, we are considering a “deep dive” workshop that will get you to that level - including Kanban, the Implementation approach, the different Boosts and Models mentioned, and other tips and tricks we use at AgileSparks to help organizations improve.  Leave me a comment here or at AgileSparks if that is something that interests you.