The Democracy of Kanban - Pecha Kucha from LKCE 2011

Another 5'40'' that rushed my heart.


Arne Roock (@arneroock) has been so nice and did all the work to not only upload the videos of all the Pecha Kuchas from Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011, but he also sent me a cut down version from only my own Pecha Kucha - 'The democracy of Kanban'.


My basic line of thought is: Kanban delivers a more detailed view on a teams' process. This helps to get rid of he black box view that simple boards of the 'ToDo | Ongoing | Done' structure deliver. The more detailed view helps not only to visualize the workflow better and more detailed and thus get more frequent and shot term feedback, it also helps to do some analysis on what's going on.




The Democracy of Kanban from Markus Andrezak on Vimeo.


In this Pecha Kucha I describe why Kanban is a crucial step towards democracy. Kanban is delivering teams a more detailed model of what is going on in their doings. This helps them to get an outside view of what they are really doing in the software development process. This detailed outside view helps the teams to come to decisions that are based on analysis rather than just a hunch.
This fact, of course, is unnerving to those advocating and selling the same recipes over and over again, regardless of the concrete context of the teams.


That again helps the team to reflect on real data of the real 'system', rather than having intuitive hunches on what's going on all the time. Indeed, doing this, has helped me to get rid of several myths that were going on all the time at my workplace. We found out that we simply do not have a problem with too much variation in requirements sizing (which many thought), we as PD are not a bottleneck in our organization we found that out by mapping our portfolio to Kanban), also some teams got better by just leveling their WIP limits differently.


I am fine and can very well accept that some people might get to similar results with intuition. But not all, very few indeed. We didn't. Many don't. That's why I think that the detailed model enabled by Kanban's visual boards together with the metrics are incredibly powerful means for teams on their journey to continuous self improvement. Guru' are not needed. That's why I think that Kanban is helping us democratize the way tat teams can improve their work(flow).


Oh, BTW ... make sure to watch the great and entertaining LKCE11 keynote by Stephen Bungay on how we lost the art of management that Klausewitz and von Moltke already discovered nearly 200 years ago. 

The (limited) value of 1x1 flow in Product Development

There is a lot of discussion going on in the net right now on the issue of single piece flow as a great tool for ... actually what? This is actually rarely defined. (And I think that is the issue of a lot of misunderstanding and disagreeing on things that are actually agreed upon - context being left out.) Also it is brought into play as a true north for a continuous improvement process - as the means of all means, the end of all ends which will lead to the ultimate goasl - the dissolving of the Kanban. Hmmm. I doubt it. Before we go further let's have a look into the follwing recruitment ad: 


Looking for Software Developers


Nickel & Dime Inc. is a new software shop that is working on highest qualty standards. We have opened new facilities that are working under lowest WiP limits. We have achieved a great level of flow. We now want to go to the next level and we are seeking your support: we want to achieve sustainable single piece flow throughout our software shop. If you are not only up for the adventure of getting there but also working under a strict, sustained single piece flow for the next years, no matter what product will be developed, no matter what other factors are weighing in - you are our man. Call us under 0800-111111


This is an impression for the recruitment going on for a company going for single piece flow in software development. Are you likely to hire? Are you likely to stay? Why? Why not?


Let's say Nickel & dime really hasn't achieved 1x1 flow yet. To get there immedeately means revolutionary change. Which problem would be triggering the need for 1x1 flow and solved right away that would justify revolutionary change?


OK, let's not go for revolutionary change but instead use Kanban to control WIP. We lower WIP piece by piece, make problems in the flow visible, caused by whatever issues in handover and development process and environment. We resolve those issues. At least we now have an idea which problems we are facing when we opt for revlutionary change. Let's say all goes well. We achieve 1x1 flow after a certain time. Did we have the right true north now, leading us through the continuous improvement w/ Kanban? That would mean we are in Nirvana now, happy, happy for ever? To answer that question, look at the recruitment ad again. Do we want to develop in strict 1x1 flow for the rest of our time? I guess not. If not, why did we go there, why did we choose that exact true north of 1x1 flow? 


Then, why did Toyota choose 1x1 flow as true north? Because in manufacturing, where you want to elminate variability this makes sense. You want to have a great takt time. As Jim Benson of Personal Kanban fame, @ourfounder tweeted today,

"1 pc flow is based on perfect value stream and like sized / defined work items. Knowledge work has high vriation of work items, rapidly changing contexts and fast evolution. Therefore 1 pc flow achieved will either be temporary or for subsets of the overall work. The moment 1 piece flow is achieved for an entire prod dev process, it ceases to be knowledge work." 

I might add, that ineed we are making money in PD beacuse of the high variation of the work, because there is no repetition and no equally sized work.


This is completely different at Toyota. They go for a minimum of variation, which is the complexity they have to master. Therefore, getting ever closer to 1x1 is the right challenge and the right true north. Still, they use it as an Utopia, no place nowhere and in fact they will never reach it across the whole line. Even less will they reach the even more favorable true north of 1x1 flow in the sequence of incoming client orders. They still try to - all of the time. They'd even be happy to get there. Except for one reason. This is where the Toyota Kata comes into play, which is embeded into their change, indeed defines their change all over the place. They are seeking for ever new small, but challenging steps getting closer to 1x1. The only reason being to make new production problems visible and trying to resolve them. The reason behind that is simply and at the same time as a stroke of genius to keep moving and in a problem solving mode all the time. What is happening along the line is that Toyota keeps awake and energized and creative all the time. Highest quality, great products, etc. are all great but calculated side effects.    


So, if we in our industry take 1x1 as the true north, would we get the same benefits as Toyota? As we are talking about knowledge work and everything Jim mentioned in his few sentences, aren't we rather risking customer focus and generation of value? I have been fiddling with the idea of 1x1 flow for a long time now - because it seems attractive, elegant, compelling. When I think it to the end - for myself - I come to the conclusion that this leads to inward bound, process releated activity rather than customer facing benefits. It gets a stale, dead end best practice with no added value.


I do see a value in 1x1 flow, though, which is using it for a sgort perod of time as a didactical tool to show teams definciencies in flow, excessive handovers, immature PD processes and environments. It is a tremendous learning experience in our field - for a certain time. No more, no less. WhenI talk about 1x1 flow I will make sure that this is the purpose I see in it.


Kanban done right will actually help to achieve Rightflow, the right level of WIP under the given context.


What do you think?

Replenishment - Craving for Feedback :)

First off: We are incredibly greatful for the response we have received so far. Thanks to all of you!


When we published the book - of course - we had plans. We also had vanity metrics in mind. We wanted:

• 200 Downloads
• 50 filled out feedback forms.

What happened is nothing short of amazing: We have more than 1100 downloads from close to 50 countries. But: We are short of reviews and feedback.


Why do we need feedback? Short question- long explanation: The whole book is a multi variable experiment to us. There are a lot of things unknown to us:

• Should we even write a book. apart from the vanity effect of writing a book, the question is: Is there a market for a book, which means are there interested readers out there, which means do we have topics that people are interested in? We don't have a clue. (Still.) The question, of course, is - why embark on a long (high WIP-limit, large batch size) unpredictable journey if it may not be relevant? 
• Which of the topics we could write about are most requested, driving most demand.
• General questions on writing a first book: which format(s), normal publisher vs. self published, distribution channels (eBook vs. print book), etc. We had the trigger when amazon came up with the amazon single concept, which made us think - ah, we can just publish something in small batch size whenever we want. (And we already drfited away from that a little, I guess).
• A million other things, basically we don't know a thing except that we some experience in some aspects of Lean and Kanban that might be worth spreading. 
• Is a German language edition important, or will English suffice?

This means, circulating a small shot and geting feedback on it is a chance for us to learn. Hence the feedback form.


As we said before, the first part has worked out brilliantly! We have more than 1100 (!) downloads in the various formats. (Still more tan half of it in PDF format, which to me as a die hard kindle fan was the first surprise - I thought most people in our community already ditched paper books, PDF etc. for the more convenient and functional formats of .mobi and .epub.)


Now comes the hard part. We planned for 50 feedbacks. We have ... less than 10. Of course, we can't expect too much yet - the book simpy needs to be read first. Also, of course, people have to *care* to give feedback. So, not getting the feedback is the first indication of not being on the right track. We also think, feedback needs time as opposed to ... downloading (for free).


The feedback we have is actually already great as it includes the statement from someone important to us and the community that it gave him the last impulse he needed to also start writing a book. (If this is all the effect we had, it's also fine!)


In short: We would *love* to hear from you:


http://bit.ly/replenishment_feedback or in free form to replenishment@portagile.com


Thanks for staying with us


Arne and Markus

Replenishment - Free eBook published w/ Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 conference

Edit: We extended the free download until mid November, so that attendees of LESS2011 in Stockholm can also download and comment on the eBook. We already have incredible 800 downloads of the book. We now are really keen on your feedback :) 
Thanks for all, Arne & Markus 




I am happy to announce that today, with the opening of the Lean Kanban Central Europe conference, Arne Roock and me published a free eBook "Replenishment". 

The book's cover

It contains 4 texts on Kanban:

1. Wip Limits
2. Guarantee bandwidth for intangibles to address sustainability of your business
3. Tool Support
4. Project Development vs. Product Development

Our preface explains why we are publishing this free version of the book, so I'll just post it here:

Dear audience,

You are holding in your hands our approach towards a MVP on an eBook on Kanban in the form of loosely coupled essays. We would like to publish it as an amazon single, comes time. Time shouldn’t be long, as the real benefit of publishing eBooks is that you can get away from large batches sizes to small batch sizes, even in publishing. We are thankful for these new options and would like to explore them. 

As this is our fist publishing of this sort and we are yet developing our model we wanted to take the opportunity to publish the smallest possible batch to you for validating our model. We assumed there is a demand for insight in the short form. We also assumed there is a demand for loosely coupled topics that came to our mind which aren’t covered in long form. We assume we should rather hit sooner than late. We also assume that in later phases of the project we publish more amazon ebook singles and can very well imagine to broaden the content by including numerous other authors. 

You now know what we assumed. We have prepared a feedback form and would be happy to receive feedback from those interested. The feedback does not only check our assumptions but leave space for feedback on anything that comes to your mind as well as topics that we have not covered but are of interest for you. 

We had the idea for this book while thinking about the great KLRIS event, organized, of course, by David J Anderson and made the approach more concrete during and after this event. Thanks again to David and his team for coming up with this great event and thus the inspiration! (The KLRIS event is also brilliantly covered in a free eBook ‚Quotable Kanban‘. )

Some note on the cover photo and the title of this book. Standing in front of the famous Geysir Stokkur (and in fact bigger, but younger brother of the actual Geysir ‚Geysir‘) and being still inspired by two full days of discussing Kanban and its future it was obvious that this is one of the most brilliant examples of replenishment. And also, what is the whole of Kanban without proper replenishment? What happens downstream if upstream doesn’t work and what is more upstream than replenishment? Indeed, Kanban leads us the way to exploit the opportunities of clever replenishment.  Read more on this in in ‚Project Development vs. Product Development’. So, rather than going for a shallow effect of showing the eruption, we go for the deep result of serious, powerful, value defining replenishment.

We hope you enjoy and have fun reading our (still) small eBook and don’t forget to give us feedback! It’s appreciated!  

Arne & Markus, 

Hamburg & Potsdam, October 2011

You can download the free version of the eBook until end of October from the following links in mobi (kindle), epub (most other ebook readers incl. iPad) and PDF formats under the following links:

http://bit.ly/replenishment_kindle

http://bit.ly/replenishment_epub

http://bit.ly/replenishment_pdf

As stated in the foreword, your feedback is greatly appreciated and crucial to us. We prepared a feedback form under 

http://bit.ly/replenishment_feedback

There you can also leave your email address if you want to be informed on updates and the final version we will sell over amazon in the not too far future.

You can also leave feedback via mail at replenishment at portagile.com ...

Thanks for your patience, interest, download and feedback

Markus

KLRIS

... stands for Kanban Leadership Retreat Iceland, which took place in the wonderful Icelandic summer 2011, luckily one not being impacted by any physical volcanic activity (even though I've learned that the people on Iceland love and repect but do not fear heir volcanoes the least.)

Replenishment

It was a gathering arranged by David Anderson to answer demand from the best trained and most well known Kanban coaches and practitioners around the world to discuss matters. The event was organized in the unformat of an unconference.

Famous German Kanban Authors ;)

If you couldn't make it, don't despair. Today David has published a free ebook, edited by Janice Linden-Reed, full of quotes covering several pillar topics of Kanban like Foundation, Transitioning, Visibility, Limited WIP, Measurement, Flow, etc. The end of the ebook also provides some longer contributions by Arne Roock, Al Shalloway and Jim Trott, Mhesh Sing, NIcholas Muldoon and also yours truly w/ 'Estimates are overrated' which you could already read here. The book contains a slightly revised version of the text thanks to some editorial work by Janice Linden Reed - thanks for the support! The text got so much better and clearer after review by Janice as a native speaker.

Thing area - birth of icelandic democracy

Please enjoy the ebook! Browsing through the ebook happily today, I was really amazed how good the experimental format of collecting quotes works. It really captures some key Kanban insights as well as some of the spirit in Rejkyavik (esp. for those who haven't been around).

Anarchy in Iceland?

There have been many insights for me in (on?) Iceland. There is one insight I had, which is rather on a quite meta level, that I want to share to reflect on the state of the community. And this one insight was not easy for me to digest in Rejkyavik itself but grew on me ever since.

close to ...

... bursting

Regarding culture, background and experiences we have been quite a diverse crew gathering in that hotel. To me that was quite a challenge at times. You can not imagine how complex it was in some of the sessions to nail down the topic that actually seemed to be so clear to me in the beginning. Just take a topic like ’Portfolio Management’. Already having contributed a chapter to the German translation of David's book, I was sure to have a grip on the topic. But after only some minutes I was shocked by the wealth of different contexts in which Portfolio Management may take place beyond what I experienced until then. There was quite some time of cognitive dissonance and dizziness in some of the sessions for me, summing up the whole picture of all participants. What is now left for me as the basic impression and insight is the openness of the leading Kanban Crew and most of all the openness to not only try to verify the Kanban model but to also look out for falsification.

Famous German Kanban Author before nearly drowning in Gullvattn

In short, I love the community, I loved the retreat and I really loved Iceland.Thanks a lot to David and his whole team for making it happen!


Go on and don't hesitate to download the ebook, read, enjoy and capture some of the spirit of those great summer days on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It's a gift :)


Thanks for your attention,


Markus

Me, stoked by Ielandic nature

Some kind of queuing effect (including at least one broken rib)

There are some amazing queuing effects. This one, not the worst, but not a funny one also, I encountered myself. Since then I know that breaking a rib means not only counting off the time until the rib is healed.

And the story goes like this. Once upon a day I rode my bike home from work - through a nice forest as usual. Then I received a call on my cell phone. Nice, friendly, communicative and outgoing guy I am, I - of course - answered the call, riding on. Then there was this log lying around and I went - whoops - over it, landed on the right side of my rip cage. I was immediately breathless and felt something's wrong - but after getting myself together for a few minutes I could just ride home. So, I thought to myself "you just broke a rib" and started thinking about how long I couldn't run (which was important to me at the time), and for how long I'd be handicapped somehow.

And here comes the fallacy. I thought of being handicapped for about two weeks, which I would be a decent time for the rips to heal off at least a little and the pain to go away. What I didn't think off was that due to the pain I couldn't breath very well. That led to me not breathing deeply. Which again led to the air not flowing well through the deeper areas of the lungs, which again led to bacteria residing in the lower bronchia. Which of course led to me getting a solid cough. Which led to more pain, which ...

It took quite a while for me to get over this.   And the general state of health of my body went down for some time. Even after getting better my immune system was down and I was getting colds quite often. So, overall I couldn't run for about 4 weeks at all due to the cold and a general weakness and I felt quite bad for at least two months, but my whole system was handicapped form something like more than a quarter of a year. And if you think I am a one off with that queuing effect or a quitter or ... (and you could go on and on describing what leads to what) - you're plain wrong. This was a very normal pattern for the consequences of breaking a rib. Old people even die often from these consequences, acquiring a pneumonia from the reduced breathing caused by the fracture.

If you don't believe me, try for yourself ;)

A 4HB update

My 4HB update to you is that in my context 4HB currently does not make any sense. As you can read here, I at least in my own opinion had quite a success applying 4HB to my personal target of getting rid all of that schlumpy access weight I gained in the last years after getting kids, changing life style after that and so on.

I reduced my weight to some sustainable 82kg, coming from 92kg (I don't even get it now that it was that much). After that I wanted to further reduce my weight to a 12% body fat bearing 78kg with 4HB and I even bragged about it. I won't do that, even though I'm quite sure it would just take me a couple of weeks. So the first message is again: 4HB works.

BUT: For me it has a specific target, which is reduce as much body fat as possible in the shortest possible time frame. And it does that well. Reading the book I am sure that @tferriss refined 4HB for that exact same target and he seems to have needed and applied it to some specific targets in his fighting caterer etc.

So to come back to why I dropped 4HB for my target of getting down to 78kg. After a little research it became apparent that Ferriss took the Paleo diet and stripped it down a little in some details and made it more practically applicable by formulating some strict, simple rules and overall simplicity.

Now this is exactly what drives me away from 4HB - the simplicity leads to nutritional behavior and simplicity that I just don't like and which doesn't feel natural to me. With 4HB that is not even intended, I guess. As I said it is not supposed to be fun, taste well or anything. It's intended to shave off weight quickly. There is just one effect that makes me a little suspicious in 4HB. On the binge days you can experience increase in body fat in just one day. If you stop 4HB you will gain quite a lot of body fat in your next two weeks. To me it indicates that something in 4HB is tricking the body in a way that's at least strange, as with the same nutrition without 4HB you don't gain body fat. To me it seems that the fat cells get so depleted that they simply get hungry and take all they can get, which is a long explanation for the yoyo effect.

Coming back to Paleo diet, which has a completely different target, which is to offer a sustainable nutrition pattern or paradigm, I don't get it at all. I guess for a carnivore it's fine. But for me as a vegetarian, I don't even get started. Yes I've read all through the Internet for the few experience reports and hints on how to go Paleo as a veggie, but nine looks convincing and sustainable to me. Challenge me on details in the comments.

Now what I am going to do seems a little harder to me but also more convincing and - main point - more sustainable. I'll follow the advice of the great book 'Vegetarian Sports Nutrition' by Ennette Larson Mayer published by Human Kinetics. The point made in this book is, and I highly embrace it, quite the contrary of Paleo and 4HB: Your nutrition should be as diverse and possible and rather than concentrating on complex carbs you should work on the right mix between complex and simple and refined carbs. This means a high variety in grains, wholebfood, legumes, vegetables etc. Sports drinks are ok, if you keep level. The recommendation is to find the right level of proteins, not to concentrate on them. You should eat fruits - and lots of them. (As there is no indication of fruits spiking the blood sugar, it's even supposed to be weight neutral.) And so on, and so on. In short it seems to be a holistic, sustainable approach to nutrition and this, I guess, is my next challenge rather than just going down some kilos. 4HB gave me a nice trigger to make nutrition a topic for well being but it now is what it is: A method to reduce weight quickly, which I don't aim at. It'd be the wrong tool for me.