Kanban India 2023: Reflections on Kanban Awareness

I had an opportunity to present a 90-min workshop on boosting business agility leveraging Kanban principles in the Kanban India 2023 conference organized by Innovation Roots in Bengaluru, India. This conference was represented by various types of people from many industries but mainly from project management offices and information technology professionals. So, it was not surprising for me to see the diverse roles of project manager, product manager, product owner, director or project management office, agile coaches, scrum masters, and a small percentage of resource managers and senior leaders. However, what surprised me largely was the complete unawareness of the Kanban principles by almost all the 30+ members that sat in my workshop across all these previously represented roles!

First, Kanban is not a framework or methodology! It is a method because Kanban can be adopted within any plan-driven or adaptive framework as well as the organization specific methodology adaptations of these frameworks specifically within their organizations! Without understanding these distinctions among framework, methodology, and methods, people have rushed to the same thought process of how they conceived waterfall methodology when the original author never even promoted the concept of such linear waterfall thinking (Rajagopalan, 2014). Instead, Kanban has been conceived as a set of cards organized in status-driven swim-lanes such as "To Do", "Doing" and "Done". 

Figure 1: Dr. Rajagopalan's synthesis of value flow

Contrary to popular thinking of Kanban cards in such statuses reducing the Kanban implementation as a tactile execution, Kanban has a set of principles that promote business level systems thinking among the team members for strategic value delivery. Since value itself flows both vertically across projects, programs, and portfolios (and hence the notions of benefit management in programs, value stream mapping in product management, and expanding these concepts with risk management in programs and portfolios), Kanban applied the lean manufacturing concepts combining managerial (efficiency) and leadership (effectiveness) with a concerted qualification efforts (efficacy) applying five important principles. Without all these five thoughts, business agility with both horizontal and vertical value delivery simply does not exist!

Figure 2: Dr. Rajagopalan's adaptation of Kanban Principles

First among these principles is the Andon thinking promoting the notion of team accountability through a transparent visual factory. While the Andon thinking emphasized team level ownership by allowing the team members to self-organize using the visual cards and queue buildups towards better documentation and training as needed to ensure cost of quality! 

This team accountability was supplemented with Jidoka that ensured people thought value delivery from an overall system (not just tactical cards like how people conceive of tasks and subtasks) but the combined influence of all these tasks towards benefits (requirements, specifications, design, quality, etc.). This "systems thinking" thought process also elevated people to relieve themselves of mundane tasks (for the sake of doing them - remember being busy is not being productive) by intelligent automation wherever possible. 

This simultaneous concept of thinking both from a systems perspective and automating mundane activities intelligently also was supported by teams and their line managers (hence project managers, product owners, scrum masters, agile coaches, managers) thinking of Heijunka bringing the resource optimization principles of reducing unevenness and minimizing overburden in distributing work for people or load with systems and processes. The entire notions of the total quality management (focusing on muda, mura, and muri) emerge from these Heijunka thinking for cost of quality!

As people owned the processes (means to end) that supported in delivering products (evaluating value for customers), the focus on Kaizen emerged on continuously improving the processes (simplifying documentation, training, reducing errors (Poka Yoke, for instance), risk management, etc.) and evaluating customer success factors and business benefits. This is when objectives and key results (OKR) were evaluated with the right level of key performance indicators (KPIs) along with built-in quality thoughts of critical success factors (CSF). 

Just to ensure that Kaizen thinking itself didn't apply to product and process increments in a monotonous way, the systems thinking was further advanced by radical innovations of continuous experiments. This thought process led to Kaikaku ensuring that everyone contributed researching market trends in augmenting business value by doing something innovative avoiding the notion of "this is how it is done here" (Kotter & Rathgeber, 2016)

As Kotter & Rathgeber (2016) very nicely discuss the using of meerkat colonies organizing differently to deal with emerging threats to their survival, it is pivotal to understand the principles of Kanban rather than bring it down to its knees by reducing them to a set of nice visuals (cards and swim-lanes) limited to the tools used! If all these principles are not understood and practiced, no tool or technology can help the teams to swarm, self-organize, and survive!

References

Kotter, J. & Rathgeber, H. (2016). That's Not How We Do It Here!" Plantation, FL: J.Ross Publishing.

Rajagopalan, S. (2014). Review of the myths on original software development model. International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications, 5(16), 103-111.

Continuous Improvement: The link between "Strengths" and "Opportunities"

Many of us that have some exposure into management either by academic preparation or by practical experience know a simple technique called the SWOT analysis. It is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This powerful technique is often delegated to management and leadership for major things like new product development, change management implementation, and sales & marketing. Its simplicity in personnel development as part of the individual development plan to rise above the competition is less understood and practiced.

For example, most people get exposure to specific techniques like programming, spoken language skills, design skills, communication skills and many others. One even goes to get certified by prestigious vendor neutral (e.g.: Project Management Institute, CompTIA) and vendor specific organizations (Microsoft, Oracle). Admiral pursuits like these give us the competitive edge in the form of strengths leading to opportunities like new job or promotion either laterally or vertically.

But, too often, not having the written SWOT analysis with SMART objectives for a 3-to-5-year strategy soon moves our own strengths into the weakness quadrant. This is because a lot of new developments happen. For instance, when I was in Vietnam last month, I saw ambitious projects like a tunnel from Vietnam to Japan being considered. Academic institutions had representation from a few countries teaching and training at their universities. Students traveled several hours each way to attend classes to increase their career potential. As globally several colleges prepare their learners to excel and several non-profit organizations provide numerous opportunities for volunteers to sharpen their competencies, the supply of such new skills and competencies is constantly increasing. So, unless someone awakens to the competitive reality, one loses the competitive edge they once thought they had!

So, how do we sharpen the saw? The best way to do this is to open the mind and have time for opportunities outside. Kaizen or Continuous Improvement is the key that is going to unlock the opportunities available by giving us a reality check on whether the skills are still on par with the market demand and allow us to gain competitive skills over time. For instance, project managers often think delivering on OBOSOT (On Budget, On Scope, and On Time) is the important metric. With the strategic talent triangle in place, the need for benefit realization is taking equal prominence in addition to OBOSOT needs. How will we ever know this if we don't attend professional networking events and certification workshops and gain guidance through mentors or coaches? 

I personally saw the six mega trends advanced by Vielemetter and Sell (2014) for leadership, such as globalization 2.0, environmental crisis, individualism and value pluralism, digital era, demographic change, and technological convergence. Don't let your skills get rusty. Refine, supplement, and augment them by sharpening them. Increase your competencies through volunteering and begin serving the ikigai that you are meant to. Opportunities only knock the doors of those that not only knock the doors but also build them of glass for opportunity to readily see and come.

Where is your SWOT and how are you preparing yourself for the future?

Ref.: Vielmetter, G. & Sell, Y. (2014). Leadership 2030. New York, NY: Amacom