Kanban for lean software development with Al Shalloway

Knowledge exists to be shared. This is one of the five key values at Equinox. Yesterday we were privileged to have one of the international leaders in Lean, Kanban, and Agile, Al Shalloway, Founder and CEO of Net Objectives, share his knowledge of Kanban with Equinox and our New Zealand customers during an New Zealand specific webinar. Al will visit New Zealand during February to work with Equinox and our customers.

This post summarises some of the key points of Al’s webinar yesterday, entitled ‘De-Mystifying Kanban, Understanding Its Many Faces’:

• Most people try to do too many things, become unproductive and feel overwhelmed
• Kanban has many faces – it is a signal, it is a team development process, it is a philosophy, and it is a change management process
• Kanban as a signal provides a visual representation of how much work is going on, and signals to us when we can accept more work into our software development system
• Kanban as a lean software development process shows us that our traditional development approaches and our normal approaches to working inherently have a great deal of waste, normally generated by delays from trying to do too many things. By limiting work-in-progress, visually tracked on a Kanban board, we shorten the time to value delivery, and this raises both productivity and quality, and also reduces or eliminates delays / waste /unnecessary cost.
• Kanban as a philosophy has advantages over other agile development philosophies including supporting enterprise adoption of Agile approaches and including explicit mechanisms to limit work in progress.
• Kanban as a change management process, provides a framework for adopting and embedding the behaviour changes associated with Kanban, including agreeing the goals, mapping value streams, defining work item types, meeting external stakeholders, creating a Kanban board, agreeing to stand up, agreeing to operational reviews, educating the team and getting started.

At Equinox we are already using Kanban extensively in our lean software development activities, but as with anything there is always more to learn, and it was fantastic today to learn from one of the best in the world, Al Shalloway.