GA 373 | Exploring Agile Kanban with Ron Pereira

Involve the people, okay? Respect their roles, respect their responsibilities. And you know, it's at the heart of lean, right? We've got continuous improvement on one pillar and respect for people on the other. They're both equally important. Okay? Without one of the pillars, the house is going to fall over. Hey everyone, this is Ron Perera and today I'm going to do another solo show. We did a solo show, oh, about a month or so ago and I got to tell you, I got an incredible amount of positive feedback for that. So thank you for that. I think we'll try to do these. I don't know if we'll do one every month, but maybe every few months we'll try to do a solo show like this and where it's just me talking to you. But to kind of honor the process, I want to begin with a quote and the quote that I want to start with is from Henry Ford and he said if everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. And I think that's a wonderful quote. And reflection as it relates to continuous improvement, relates to lean, and it relates to, for sure, agile or in this case, the topic that I want to explore today is Kanban as it relates to agile. Now, we have recently released a course and about to release a second course on Agile Kanban. Now we're putting the word agile in front of Kanban just to not confuse folks, because we do have Kanban as it relates to manufacturing and supply chain. We have a course on that where we're talking about withdrawal Kanbans and production Kanbans and signal Kanbans and so forth. So moving material through a factory or supply chain. Okay, Agile Kanban is not that. So Agile Kanban is. It's more associated with, let's say, knowledge work. And in fact, Agile Kanban is something that we use here at Gemba Academy and over the years we've used different forms of it and we are full blow Agile Kanban users now. I mean, because we are a knowledge work company, which is interesting. I mean, we produce our widgets that we produce our videos or podcasts or things like that. So it's, it's not necessarily software as, although I guess technically it is sort of software when it goes up on a website and so forth. But you know, it's been an evolution with us here at Gemba Academy and how we've been practicing with it. And I'm really excited about how it's helped us and how it's going to continue to help us. And so that's What I want to really focus on in this episode is just talk a little bit about what it is and why it might apply to you, even if you don't think it might. Because I remember the first time I ever experimented with what we call Agile Kanban was many, many years ago. And it was really just more for my own personal productivity. And if you've never seen like an Agile Kanban board, just imagine a couple columns on a big whitebo. One is, might be, might be titled to do like something that you want to get done. So to do another column in the middle might be doing and then the third might be done. That's a very basic, the most simplest form of a Kanban board. Agile Kanban board. Okay. And so what I used to have, I would update one every week and I would have some post it notes in the to do column. Those are the main things that I wanted to get done that week. And when I started working on one, I grabbed the post it and I put it into the doing column and then I would work on it and kind of maybe make a few notes on the post it if there was any issues or anything like that. And then when I got it done, I would move it to the done column. And I had a kind of a rule that I would have no more than two, sometimes three things in the doing column. Some people are like no more than one. We call this a WIP limit, work in process limit. And so you can experiment with that. But I think I gravitated more towards two or three at the most. And it was very helpful for me just to stay focused, you know, like, oh, I have this thing to do and I would even order the post it notes in the order that I wanted to get them done in the to do column. Sort of a priority, right, of, of stacking the Post it notes. And I did it all analog back then, you know, I didn't have software or anything like that, although there's some really nice software out there. In fact, we actually use an off the shelf software to manage our internal Kanban boards. But you don't need software especially to get started. So that's where I would encourage you. If you've not ever explored or experimented with Agile Kanban is even if you're in a manufacturing environment and you're dealing with traditional production withdrawal, Kanban and so forth, you know, everybody's got things they want to get done and so start with that three column board to do, doing and done and just see how it works for you. Because I have A feeling it's going to help your productivity more than you realize. So, so that's the first thing is why and how you can use that as an individual now as it relates to your work in your company. Now for sure, if you're in knowledge work and you're producing for, I mean the most common use of Agile and Kanban is for software development. Okay, that's sort of where it was born. But, but it doesn't have to be that if you are working and you just have tasks that you want to get done or different things that, that need to happen. And there's almost imagine swim lanes on your, on your Kanban board. So you might have, you know, like a production swim lane and then you might have like for us, I'll just tell you, I'll give you a. Peel back the curtain a little bit on how Gemba Academy uses it. So we're making videos, right? So let's say we have a course that has 10 videos in it. Well, we're going to have 10, 10 individual Kanban cards for each video. And then those, those cards will move through various processes that we have. You know, we write scripts and we've, we do, you know, we review the script and then we shoot the video and then we edit the video and then we add captions or whatever it might be. And so we have different, different steps through the process and we just, we literally move the card through the process. And so at any time you can kind of stand back and look at the board and you can see where you're at. Okay. But we also have things like quizzes. You know, a course might have some quizzes associated with it. So we've got a dedicated swim lane for the quizzes. And so you can see because a different, different team might work on, or different people might work on the quizzes. And so we, we have again various steps for how a quiz moves throughout the process. And again we have a dedicated Kanban card for those. Now those might be what we would call a child card to the video card. Okay, but doesn't, you don't have to be fancy like that. You could just have a card for the quizzes and then we might have some other things like overview documents. So we, all of our videos, we have sort of written PDF overviews that are associated with them. And so again we're going to have overview Kanban cards and those have their own workflow that they go through. So it sounds like a lot, but what it does is it really actually simplifies things and Helps you really have really good clarity on what's going on. And then you can, you can, you can pull back and you can see if you're having any bottlenecks. You can see if. Because I can. I gotta tell you, when we first started using it, we had a lot of assumptions on where our bottlenecks were. And in some cases we were right, but in some cases we were surprised that there were some processes that were taking a little bit longer than we realized. And it wasn't until we had Kanban cards just sitting in certain columns for number of days before you realized, whoa, those have been there for three days or, and what's going on? And then we come to find out that, you know, we've got some, some opportunity for improvement in particular areas. So that's why it's a pretty exciting topic. And I think all really continuous improvement practitioners should be familiar with the basics of it. Okay, but the other thing that I want to talk about today is the four Agile Kanban principles. Now, we didn't invent these principles. These have been in the agile community for many years. But they're the principles that are associated with Agile Kanban. But I got to tell you, they also apply for anyone practicing continuous improvement in general. Just that these are, I would call meta principles. Okay. And so I want to do, I want to kind of step through each principle. We'll talk a little bit about how it relates to Agile Kanban, but also maybe we'll touch on, you know, how this relates to just continuous improvement in general. Now, the first principle is to start with what you do now. Okay. So going back to Gemba Academy, before we practiced Agile Kanban to the letter of the law, we actually had some spreadsheets and Google sheets and different things, and we were sort of tracking things in there in that methodology. And so if something got done, we would put a date in the done column. So it was basically an Agile Kanban board, but kind of built into a spreadsheet, if you can imagine that. But that's how we started. And then when we transitioned over to Agile Kanban, we essentially duplicated the spreadsheet. But it really simplified things when we went to the Agile, because we simply just had to move a card from one column to the next. We didn't have to go in and type dates into a spreadsheet or anything like that. Okay. But the important thing is that you don't need to just like throw away everything that you've done. Okay. If you have some sort of a tracking mechanism that you're following today. You can start with that and then slowly kind of bring it over to a Kanban board. Okay, now, but start with what you do. Now that also applies to just continuous improvement in general. You know, so often when people start practicing lean, they get a little bit excited and, you know, they might learn about a tool here or there and they just, they almost, sometimes they almost beat themselves up for, why haven't we been doing this before? And come to find out a lot of people are doing certain aspects of continuous improvement. They just don't call it that. You know, I've talked to a lot of people over the years who say, well, yeah, we didn't really realize we were doing lean or doing continuous improvement, but we were. We didn't call it that. Maybe we didn't formalize it, but we were. So, so don't beat yourself up. Start with what you do now and just learn from where, where what you've done in the past and just keep making it better. Okay? That's what this first principle is all about. Now the second principle, again as it relates to Agile Kanban, is to agree to pursue incremental evolutionary change. Okay, Again, coming back to us, you know, here we are, we had these spreadsheets that we were using and then we stepped into it and we started with a real simple board to begin with. Okay. In fact, we didn't have separate swim lanes for quizzes and overview documents and different things like that. We had it all in one lane and it worked. We just sort of tracked the quizzes and the overview documents on each individual video card as subtasks and different things like that. But then eventually we realized, hey, you know, these are really separate things and we need to be kind of tracking them separately because who knows, maybe the quiz process is our bottleneck or an opportunity for improvement. Maybe the overview documents. Another column we have is, you know, writing titles and descriptions for videos you think doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is, it's a huge deal. Right, because we don't get the title of the video right or we don't have a good description right. People may never ever watch the video. Could be the best video. So we put a lot of time and effort and how we do titles and descriptions. Okay, so that's its own dedicated line on the, on the Kanban board. But again, we didn't start that way. We, we added those, you know, over the weeks and months of practicing Agile Kanban. Now, obviously agreeing to pursue incremental evolutionary change is at the heart of what we're doing with Lean. Right. That's what Kaizen means. Right. You know, incremental change. It means to break apart, put it back together again, change for the better. Right? That's really what we're trying to do. So again, so often when people first start with lean or I see this a lot in Six Sigma, I see this a lot in people doing like a black belt certification or green belt certification that put all this pressure on themselves that they've got to like hit this grand slam with their black belt project. And sure, we want the black belt project to be pretty significant and have a nice, you know, impact on the organization, but we also don't expect to cure cancer. Right. With a black belt project. Okay. And so having this idea that, you know, a black belt project, you're not, it's not once you're done, it's not like graduation. That's the analogy that I use. A lot of people feel like when you get certified that that's graduation, like you're done. I actually say no, it's more like you just got married. When you get married to someone, you know, that's sort of the beginning of a new life, right? Together. Well, that's how it is when you get certified by Gamba Academy at least is we want you to look at it more as a marriage continuous improvement and that you're just beginning this life together and you're going to keep going over time and keep making changes and keep making improvements. Okay? That's principle two. Principle three. Respect the current process roles and responsibilities. And this is a big one, okay? Now this is really at the heart of change management as well. And so whether it's Agile Kanban or it's some, some new tool, some new. You're going to go do value stream mapping across your organization. I don't. It doesn't matter what it is. You've got to respect the current process. You've got to respect the current roles and people's current responsibilities, okay? No one likes change, okay? And the Agile Kanban folks recognized this because they knew putting up these big boards and start moving these cards through all these different, you know, process steps and so forth. And people get nervous, man, because they feel like they're being watched and they feel like they're being measured. And fact of the matter is we are, we're measuring the process, you know, but, but we've got to be able to also be super respectful, super transparent. You know, One of the things that I think is very important in this principle is to Involve the people who are doing the work in the creation of the boards. Okay. Like Greg and Carlos and the different folks on our team, Jessica, they're involved in building the boards. They're the ones help to decide what are the steps that we're following here. And, and then they're the ones who are ultimately moving the cards through the process as well. Okay. So that's another way to kind of respect the process and the roles and responsibilities. That is to have those folks deeply involved, intimately involved in the creation of the actual Kanban board. Or if we're doing just traditional Lean, you want to go do value stream mapping or you want to go do 5s somewhere. Involve the people, involve. Okay? Respect their roles, respect their responsibilities. And you know, it's at the heart of Lean, right? We've got continuous improvement on one pillar and respect for people on the other. So they go. They're both equally important. Okay. Without one of the pillars, the house is going to fall over. Okay. All right. Now the fourth principle of Agile Kanban is to encourage acts of leadership at all, all levels. Now what this really means is that leadership comes from everyday acts of people doing the work on the front lines with their teams, and it's the people doing the work. That's where we really got to be investing all of our energy. Okay. And then as, again, as it relates to Agile Kanban or moving information or cards through a system, you've got to understand that the real expertise is there at Agemba, the place the work is done. It's not the engineer or it's not the. If you're practicing traditional Scrum, the Scrum Master, it's not. Those aren't necessarily the experts of the process. They might be experts at Agile, but the people doing the work, those are the ones that we've got to, to, to really honor and we've got to really involve in this whole process. Okay. Because as I said earlier, it's all about respect for people. And if we don't respect people, Agile Kanban won't work. But guess what? No aspect of Lean will work if we're not respecting people. Okay, so yeah, those are the four, the four Agile Kanban principles. Principle one, start with what you do now. Principle two, agree to pursue incremental evolutionary change. Principle three, respect the current process roles and responsibilities. And principle four, encourage acts of leadership at all levels. Okay, so that's just a quick peek. We actually have a module in our Introduction to Agile Kanban course that covers these same principles. But yeah, I'm really excited about this course because it's something that we've been talking about for many years and I think it's something that the Agile community is obviously very passionate about what they do. But I feel like there's a big opportunity for the folks who are practicing lean to open their eyes and their hearts a little bit to what the folks in the Agile community have been doing for many, many years. Because I think there's a lot a traditional lean thinking organization who may not necessarily practice Agile can benefit from. So same with the Agile community, they obviously benefit from the Lean community. So I feel like we're all in the same team, we're just maybe cousins, but we're all from the same family and that's called continuous improvement. Okay, so, well, yeah, that's what I've got for today in this episode. If you do want to learn more about all this Agile Kanban stuff, go over to gembacademy.com and then this is in our school of Lean and this particular course is called Introduction to Agile Kanban and we've got two other phases, depending on when you're listening to this, that are going to be released over the coming weeks and months. And, and, and, but, but we're sip. We're separating them so they'll look like different courses. But, but you'll see them when you go peek in there at the school lean. So go check it out if you want to learn more. Again. Gembacademy.com and next week we'll get back to a regular guest. But yeah, hopefully this added some value and love to hear. If you have any questions, shoot me a note over@ronbaacademy.com or we'll link this up on LinkedIn. We can, but we can chat about it over there as well. Okay, take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, GEMBA Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.