Kanban Canvas v2.0

I’ve just uploaded a new version of my Kanban Canvas which has some minor updates. These changes more closely reflect how I have been using the canvas, and worked well in my recent training in South Africa.

The main difference is in the layout of the Impacts, which are now represented as the corners of a triangle. When identifying impacts, I regularly found that examples didn’t fit neatly into one of the original sections, so this new arrangement makes relative placement more natural. It also now matches the way I previously described making an impact with Kanban Thinking.

In addition, I have tweaked the wording of the Impact prompts from “what stories might be told…” to “what stories can be told…”. This has shifted the emphasis in exploring impacts away from imagining idealised future states and instead towards sharing actual experiences which can be learned from. As a result story-telling can become more natural and Anecdote Circles can be used more easily.

The other small change is in the wording of the Study prompt, which is now “what could be learnt about customer and stakeholder needs, the resultant demand, and how that demand is processed”. Previously it was about “what could be done to learn” but I found it more useful to begin thinking and capturing the potential learning itself, rather than focussing on the mechanism or technique used.

If you have already downloaded the Kanban Canvas, the new version can be found with the same link as the previous version. If you would like to download the new version, you can do so from the Kanban Thinking site. The French translation is also already available, and I hope to be able to update the other translations soon.

 

Lean-Agile Strategy Days: An X-Matrix and Agendashift Fusion

PhotonQ-FusionI’m really excited by a new venture on June 7-8 with Mike Burrows. Its called Lean-Agile Strategy Days, and will be an opportunity for attendees to explore with Mike and myself how we can combine and synthesise the X-Matrix and Agendashift as approaches to Strategy Deployment.

From the event page:

We’ll be looking at strategy – how to engage people in its development, how to develop and test the thinking, and how to build habits of follow-through. You’ll be learning through practice, and at the same time participating in an exciting collaboration. Together, let’s discover how these important topics interact and amplify each other.

I’ve blogged previously about Strategy Deployment and Agendashift with my early thoughts on the relationship between the two. Since then have I become an Agendashift partner and attended Mike’s workshop as a participant. As we have chatted and collaborated a couple of things have become apparent.

  1. There is a huge overlap in our thinking and philosophy around how we approach helping organisations through change.
  2. There is a huge opportunity for more collaboration between people with similar philosophies but different ideas.

After Mike ran another collaborative Flow Days workshop with Patrick Steyaert earlier this year, we realised they had created a good way of taking advantage of both these points, and Lean-Agile Strategy Days was born. We hope that this grows into a series of events where different people collaborate to combine their ideas – co-operating rather than competing.

If you want to learn about Strategy Deployment, with either the X-Matrix, or Agendashift, or if you want to be involved in innovating ways of combining the two, then please join us. Super Early Bird price is just £535 + VAT until May 8th for two days of learning and discovery with myself and Mike.

Book now – we hope to see you there!

Announcing the X-Matrix Jigsaw Puzzle

fitting the pieces together

The X-Matrix Jigsaw Puzzle is what I call the exercise I use in Strategy Deployment workshops to help people experience creating an X-Matrix in a short space of time. It consists of a pre-defined and generic set of “pieces” with which to populate the various sections, deciding which pieces should go where, and how they fit together.

I’ve just created a page to make this available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.  If you try it out, please let me know how you get on!

LeanAgileUS 2017

Lean Agile US

LeanAgileUS is taking place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 27-28th. It has a real mix of great speakers and content, covering all aspects of Lean and Agile including Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, DevOps amongst other topics. I expect it to be an event where people come together for dialogue about different perspectives. I hope to hear more of “That’s interesting, tell me more” and less of “That’s wrong, and here’s why“.

My contribution will be twofold.

Firstly I have a talk on the Monday entitled “Good Agile / Bad Agile: The Difference and Why it Matters”, which you may recognise as the title of a recent post. I will be exploring some of those ideas in more detail. Here’s the abstract:

Stories of Bad Agile are common, where Agile is a local and tactical implementation, resulting in failed projects and initiatives. Businesses don’t get the results they had hoped for and Agile gets the blame for not working. Good Agile, however, is possible when it is directly and explicitly related to a business strategy. Thus Agile needs to be deployed strategically, with a clear diagnosis of the critical problem or opportunity faced, guiding policies on the approach to addressing the diagnosis, and coherent actions to implement the guiding policies. This talk will show how this approach can lead to Good Agile which is evolved through experimenting as opposed to Bad Agile being instantiated by copying.

Secondly I have a half day workshop on the Tuesday entitled “Enterprise Agility with Strategy Deployment”. This will be an opportunity to learn more about the X-Matrix, experience the process of creating one, and understand how to use it alongside other A3 templates. Here’s the abstract:

Strategy Deployment is a style of organisational improvement that engages the entire workforce in figuring out how the business can survive and thrive. This course will introduce Strategy Deployment using a framework called the X-Matrix – an A3 format which concisely visualises the alignment of results, strategy, indicators, and tactics on a single sheet of paper. With this approach, a transformation can be viewed as a form of Catchball, a Lean process where ideas are passed around an organisation as teams collaborate to experiment and discover solutions. In this way, solutions emerge from the people closest to the problem, rather than being defined and dictated by management.

The whole event is great value for money. Register soon as I’m sure it will sell out!

Dates For Your Diary

I’ve just updated my Calendar page with a couple of conferences coming up, as well as a new date for my Kanban Thinking course.

LeanUX15, New York, April 15-19

This is going to be a great event, with a fantastic line-up of speakers, covering a wide range of topics. I’m going to be talking about my current ideas on Strategy Deployment. If you use the code LeanUXSpeaker you’ll get 20% off. Prices go up on March 21st!

Agile Cymru, Cardiff, July 7-8speaker graphic-01

Another great event,  with another fantastic line-up of speakers! I’m particularly looking forward to this one because I get to go back to Cardiff, where I grew up and went to school.

Kanban Thinking Course, London, May 30-April 1

I’m running another training course with agil8 again in London. Here’s some feedback from the last one I ran:

  • Really engaging.
  • Found it fascinating and to be honest that surprised me.
  • It felt like a university lecture, in a good way! Very insightful and complete.

Kanban Thinking Workshop in London

Kanban-thinking-banner

I have another public Kanban Thinking workshop coming up in London (March 5-6), in collaboration with Agil8, and to fill the last few places, I can offer a discount! Book now, using the code KS25 to get 25% off the standard price, and get 2 days of fun, discover how to design a kanban system by populating a kanban canvas, and learn how to make system interventions which have a positive impact.

To wet your appetite, here’s a couple of photos from a recent workshop. (Click for larger versions).

IMG_1371IMG_1370

Looking back on 2014

This is a little later than I would have liked, but 2015 seems to have had a busy start! As I look back on last year, the main thing that stands out for me was my decision to go solo. As a result, the second half of the year was an interesting learning curve for me, and as I look forward to 2015, I’m please with the way events have unfolded, and excited by future possibilities. In particular, I’ve been able to focus more time on Kanban Thinking, including put together the downloadable Kanban Canvas, and writing more about how I use it.

On the topic of writing, you can read the blog’s 2014 annual report for the full statistics. The highlights for me were the fact that I had my busiest day, and I managed 23 posts – a significant increase from 2013. I hope I can maintain, and even continue to improve that number. Also interesting is that the top 3 posts remain the same; Kanban, Flow and Cadence“,What is Cadence? and Fidelity – The Lost Dimension of the Iron Triangle. Its nice to see Running the Ball Flow Game come in at number 4 – I love playing that game in workshops and it always seems to generate good discussion and learning. Finally, Making an Impact with Kanban Thinking is at number 5, and given that this is a recent post, I hope this bodes well for the future of Kanban Thinking in general.

The other big passion of mine in 2014 was taking up running, which I mentioned a when I posted on Estimates as Sensors. According to MapMyRun, I did a total of 177 runs, with an average run of 5.11 miles (giving a total of 904.5 miles), and a longest run of 17 miles. My average pace was 9:06 min/mile and my fastest pace was 4:31 min/mile.

For posterity, here’s my PB’s for the 2014

I’m currently training for the Brighton Marathon (watch this space for a call for sponsorship) so I’m also expecting those number to go up (or down for pace!). As part of my running addiction, I’ve become involve in my local parkrun community – something I gave a lightning talk about at LKUK14.

Thanks you for reading this blog, and for the continued support. I look forward to more of the same in 2015, and hope I get to meet many of you in person. Please let me know if you’d like me to work with you, or just say “Hi” if you see me at a conference or event.

Heuristics for Becoming a Learning Organisation at Spark the Change

InfoQ have just published the talk I gave at this year’s Spark the Change conference on “Heuristics for Becoming a Learning Organisation“. This was the first time I introduced the Kanban Canvas, and gives some background to the questions it asks.

Please follow the link to watch, as I can’t embed it here.

Lean Kanban Central Europe 2014

Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t help but get involved in Lean Kanban Central Europe again this year, and have even taken on more of a role by helping co-chair the Kanban track. Its always a great event (one of my favourites) because the people and content are such high calibre. This year looks to be no different.

This year I’m also running a workshop (as previously announced). I hope to see you there!