Improve Collaboratively

Something to remember about Kanban is that it's an evolutionary change process. That is change comes in small batches, small doses. Teams continually evolve, getting better, sprint over sprint. And so our sixth practice of Kanban is improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally. Okay, Scrum masters. So to do this, we're going to use the plan, do, check, adjust, cycle, the PDCA cycle. First step, we're going to plan. Let's establish some objectives. What is an experiment we can run? What's the hypothesis? Where's the area that we want to improve? The next step is do. Do the experiment. Well, there's nothing like experimenting. Do the thing, do whatever you just were planning to do, and then check. Here's where it gets interesting. So now we're gonna. We're gonna validate the results of our experiments we planned. We did. Now let's check, gather up the data. Did we meet our expected outcomes? Did we fail? It's okay if we failed. The important thing is that we have the data now to know what, what works and what, what didn't work. We're also going to check the process. Did our, did we design a good experiment? Could we really have done that better? And then check for patterns. Certain experiments are going to be easier or better to perform than others. So. So this whole thing about check is checking not only the experiment you ran, but the process itself so we can improve the whole, the whole system and then finally adjust. We're going to adjust based on the data we gathered. The adjust phase helps us define the next steps. What are we going to adjust? We're going to adapt our processes, we're going to adapt our practices. We're going to take a different approach. We're going to make the same. We're going to adjust. So plan, do, check and adjust. Now, a fundamental principle in the PDCA cycle is the idea of iterating. We're going to iterate towards the goal. Once a hypothesis is confirmed or negated, did we miss it? The then executing the cycle again will bring us closer to having more knowledge, increased understanding, more collective ownership and knowledge of what's happening in our systems and thus closer to our goals. So our PDCA cycles need to be regularly implemented, regularly run. It should be continually going on sprint, over sprint, over sprint. Let me introduce you to the improvement Kata. The improvement Kata is a routine for moving from a current state to. To a new state in a creative, directed and meaningful way. It's based on a four part model. Number one, consider the future state. Where do we want to go? Number two, we've got to grasp our current condition. We've got to understand where we're at. Maybe takes the form of surveys or feedback sessions. Third, we're going to define the next target condition. What's the next step we can take to get towards that future state? Not the future state itself, just the very next target condition. And fourth, we're going to move towards that target condition iteratively, and that's going to uncover obstacles that we need to work on. Simple four steps, repeated incrementally until the desired state is reached. Pro Tip. Create an experiment log to track your experiments and the results. Keep it simple. Just have the date, the name of the experiment, which team's running it, and both the expected and another space for actual results. So that's the improvement kata a tool you can put to work on your teams today. So, Scrum Masters, you're probably really beginning to see that Kanban is all about evolutionary change, small changes made over time. And so to improve collaboratively, what we want to do is get the team's feedback and together improve in small bits. Now, where might you gather this feedback? Well, heck, Scrum Masters, you got five events at your fingertips if you're running Scrum that you can get feedback from. How about the Daily Scrum or the Sprint review or the the Sprint planning sessions? Those are all feedback sessions. But I'll tell you my favorite, and I'm guessing it might be yours too. When it comes to this topic, it was going to be the retrospective, right? Look, if you're running good retrospectives, you should have improvement items every single retro. You might even have a list of them already in your backlog. Those are great areas to pull data from and begin to create experiments. Let's give you an example. Let's say you notice cycle time is increasing in the testing workflow step. You bring that data to the next retrospective and propose an experiment. Maybe something like if we reduce the amount of work in progress in testing by one should decrease our cycle time, which would actually decrease our overall lead time too, which is a great benefit as well. So, as a team, we come up with a hypothesis and we run an experiment. Reduce WIP by one, run that experiment for a couple sprints, and then you're going to check the results and adjust. You're going to make some sort of change as a team, improving collaboratively and evolving experimentally. Okay, you know what's going to happen. Now it's your turn. Now it's your turn. Scrum Masters, consider an experiment you could run with your team. Make sure it's small. Write it down in your experiment log. You know, just create some form of a spreadsheet. Write down the experiment you want to run. You want to run this experiment for more than just one sprint. Let's say run it for three sprints. One sprint's not enough data for you typically to see if the change took hold. Okay, so I want you to plan one experiment. I want you to do the experiment for three sprints. Then you're going to check it. You're going to check what were the results. You had an experiment. What were you trying to prove? Did you prove the hypothesis? Did you negate the hypothesis? What happened? They want you to adjust and decide what to do. You may need to run that experiment for another sprint or two sprints or whatever. Maybe that experiment is done and you want to try another one. You're going to adjust. Our 6th Kanban practice improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally.