Three Agile Strategies That Will Make A Strong Impact

The impact of something dropping into water, with splashes and ripples, representing agile strategies making an impact on a business
Impact by Walter-Wilhelm

Much of my recent writing about Strategy Deployment has been driven by the idea that Agility is a strategy while Agile is a Tactic. However, Agility is a very broad topic, and can easily slip into being a buzzword or platitude. In other words Bad Agile. This suggests that there are some more useful Good Agile strategies.

When I blogged about deploying strategies as choices I suggested that the Agile Manifesto could be interpreted as a set of strategies. They looked like this.

  • Enabling individuals and interactions even over common processes and tools
  • Developing working software even over providing comprehensive documentation
  • Collaborating with customers even over sticking to contractual obligations
  • Responding to change even over keeping to planned commitments

More recently, I’ve been wondering whether there is a better way of describing agile strategies in order to emphasise the core challenges that agile is addressing. That took me back to the Kanban Thinking Impacts that I described as part of the Kanban Thinking model I created. Those impacts are Flow, Value and Potential.

Flow

A “Flow” strategy is one which focuses on “doing the work right”. This involves organising people into cross-functional teams who can collaborate to deliver work quickly. In other words, work flows through teams rather than people being allocated to work. Further, this can mean a shift from an annual planning cycle where people juggle multiple short-lived initiatives. Instead, there are more frequent and dynamic investments in long-lived value streams. As a result, the business is able to respond to unforeseen challenges and take advantage of unanticipated opportunities.

Using the even-over format, I would describe this as a choice to “Organise for fast flow of change even over long-term certainty of plans“.

Value

A “Value” strategy is one which focuses on “doing the right work”. This involves structuring the work to be able to continuously understand and meet customer needs. As a result, there is usually a shift from projects to products. Projects often try to optimise the cost of work through separate technical or architectural solutions. Conversely, products try to optimise the benefits of the work by collectively prioritising collaborative solutions. As a result, products can be continuously validated and evolved to deliver what is most important to customers. After all, increasing value is infinite while reducing cost is zero-bounded.

Using the even-over format, I would describe this as a choice to “Maximise the value of products even over minimising the cost of projects“.

Potential

A “Potential” strategy is one which focuses on “doing the work sustainably”. This involves working in a way which enables long-term adaptability and learning. As a result, there is a shift from cutting corners and short-term solutions to building quality in and long-term investments. By creating fast feedback cycles, teams can learn more about their products and services and how they are being used. Further, that feedback enables people to have autonomy, mastery and purpose in their work which creates more potential in them. To paraphrase an expression used by Toyota, build people in order to build products.

Using the even-over format, I would describe this as a choice to “Create feedback for long-term potential even over making short-term gains“.

It should be obvious that these three strategies work together. Achieving flow requires organising around value, and delivering value requires achieving flow. Both require building long-term potential. However, they each emphasise something different and important in terms of organising for flow, delivering products of value, and creating potential through feedback.

These three strategies are just the way I think about the core challenges that Agile is addressing. Let me know if you have different strategies and what they leverage.

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.

 

Kanban Deployment with the X-Matrix

This is a continuation of my musings on Strategy Deployment, the X-Matrix and Kanban Thinking (including Strategy Deployment as Organisational Improv and How Do I Know If Agile Is Working). I’ve been thinking more about the overlap between Strategy Deployment and Kanban and come to the conclusion that the intersection of the two is what could be called “Kanban Deployment” [1].

Let me explain…

To begin with, the name Strategy Deployment describes how a centralised decision is made about strategy, which is deployed such that decentralised decisions can be made on defining and executing plans. The people who are engaged at the coal face are the people who are most likely to know what might (or might not) work. In other words its the strategy that is deployed, not a plan.

Similarly, Kanban Deployment can be used to describe how a centralised decision is made about kanban as an approach to change, which is deployed such that decentralised decisions can be made on defining and executing processes. Again, the people who are engaged at the coal face are again the people who are most likely to know what might (or might not) work. Its kanban that is deployed, not a process.

With this perspective, we can look at how the X-Matrix could be used to describe a Kanban Deployment in terms of Kanban Thinking. (For a brief explanation of the X-Matrix see a post on how we used the approach at Rally).

The Results describe the impact we want the kanban system to have, and the positive outcomes we are looking to achieve with regard to Flow, Value and Potential. Just like with ‘regular’ Strategy Deployment, an economic model as recommended by Don Reinertsen is likely to provide clues as to what good results would be, as will a good understanding of fitness for purpose.

For Strategies we can look to the Kanban Thinking interventions of Study, Share, Stabilise. Studying the system is a strategy for learning more about the current context. Sharing knowledge is a strategy for creating a common understanding of the work and the way the work is done. Stabilising the work is a strategy for introducing policies which will enable and catalyse evolutionary change.

The Indicators are equivalent to the Kanban Thinking intervention Sense. These measures of improvement, while proxies, should give quick and regular feedback about whether the kanban system is likely to lead to the results.

Lastly the Tactics are equivalent to the Kanban Thinking intervention Search. These are the specific practices, techniques and policies used as part of the experiment that are run. The Kanban Method core practices can also provide guidance as to what tactics can be used to design the kanban system.

While I’m not sure I would want to be overly rigid about defining the strategies, I find the X-Matrix a useful model for exploring, visualising and communicating the elements of a kanban system and how they correlate to each other. As with all tools like this (i.e. A3s) its not the template or the document that is important, its the conversations and thinking that happen that have the value.

[1] I did consider the name “Kanban Kanri” for the alliteration, but apart from preferring to minimise Japanese terminology, it’s probably meaningless nonsense in Japanese!

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

A Kanban Thinking Pixar Pitch

I’ve been using the Pixar Pitch as a fun way for teams to discuss and explore the problem they are trying to solve by telling a story about what has been happening that led to the need for a kanban system. I thought it might be useful to use the formula to tell a dramatised story of what led me to first try using a kanban approach, and why that led to Kanban Thinking.

The Pixar Pitch

Once upon a time there was a team who were using Scrum to manage their work. They were cross-functional, with a ScrumMaster and Product Owner, developing and supporting a suite of entertainment websites for a global new-media organisation.

Every Sprint they prioritised and planned the next couple of weeks, developed and tested functionality, fixed live issues, released updates when ready, and reviewed and retrospected their work.

And every Sprint the team was unhappy with the way they were working. The Product Owner felt that the developers could be more productive, and the developers felt that the Product Owner could be giving more guidance on what build. Stories were completed, but features took a long time to release as the team thrashed to get the functionality right, meet commitments and increase velocity.

So every Sprint they inspected and adapted. The Spring length was shortened to get quicker feedback. The style of User Stories was adjusted to try and focus more on value. And yet things did’t improve significantly.

One day they decided to stop focussing on doing Scrum, and start using ideas from Kanban, experimenting with some different approaches that they hadn’t previously tried.

Because of that they stopped using Sprints and de-coupled their cadences, reprioritising their ready queue every week, planning only when they had capacity to start new work, releasing and reviewing every fortnight, and retrospecting every month.

And instead of breaking work down into small User Stories that would take less than 2 weeks, they focussed on finishing larger MMFs, which might take months in some cases.

And they paid more attention to their Work in Process, in particular making sure they only worked on one large new feature at a time.

And instead of the Sprint Burndown they tracked their work using a Cumulative Flow Diagram, Parking Lot and Lead Time report.

Because of that the whole team became more focussed on delivering valuable features, were more collaborative in how they figured out what the details of those feature were, and were more reliable in when they delivered them.

Until finally everyone was working well together as a much happier group, delivering much more value, and in a good place to continue to improve.

Kanban Thinking

The point of this story is not to try and make one approach sounds better than another, or to suggest that any approach can be a bad choice in some way. Rather it is that the team learned about what would and wouldn’t work by asking questions about their process and experimenting with all aspects of it. The end result might have ended up being exactly what an expert or consultant might have recommended or coached. That’s OK, because what is important is the understanding that was created about why things are as they are. This capability to solve problems, as opposed to implement solutions, sets a team up to continually evolve and improve as their context changes.

This principle – helping teams to solve problems rather than implement solutions – is what fascinated me about kanban when I first came across it and started exploring how it could be used. Its what ultimately led to the emergence of Kanban Thinking as a model for helping achieve this, and the Kanban Canvas as a practical tool.

Strategy Deployment, the X-Matrix and Kanban Thinking

Strategy Deployemnt

Kanban Systems are an enabler of evolutionary change. And so is Strategy Deployment. Strategy can be defined as how you will make a positive impact, and this implies change. As the saying goes, “hope is not a strategy”, and neither is doing nothing. Deploying that strategy, as opposed to defining and imposing a tactical plan, enables the evolution of the tactics by the people implementing them.

I have found that putting Strategy Deployment in place is my preferred approach to starting off any change initiative, and that as suggested above, there is a strong synergy with a kanban-based approach. (This is not surprising, given the roots of both in Toyota and Lean). In particular, I have been using a format known as the X-Matrix to setup Strategy Deployment.

The X-Matrix

The X-Matrix is a cornerstone of Strategy Deployment. It is an A3 format that provides a concise and portable shared understanding of how strategy is aligned to the deployed tactical initiatives, alongside leading indicators of progress and anticipated end results. I learned about the X-Matrix from the book “Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise” by Thomas L. Jackson, and I have previously blogged about how we used the approach at Rally.

CD Form 1-2_A3-X X-matrix

The X-Matrix has 5 primary sections, all of which are connected. At the bottom, below the X, are the results that we hope to achieve. To the left of the X are the key strategies that will get us to those results, and to the immediate right of the X are the measures of improvement that indicate how well we are doing. (Note that this is labelled process as it refers to process improvements). At the top, above the X, are the tactics that we will use to implement the strategy. Finally, on the far right are the teams that will be involved in the work. To link these together, the corners of the X-Matrix are used to show the strength of correlation or contribution between the different elements.

Thus it becomes easy to visualise and explore how a strategy, or a measure, correlates to achieving results. Similarly, it is easy to see and discuss how a tactic will correlate to achieving a strategy, or how it will contribute to moving the needle on a measure. And it is clear who is accountable or involved in each tactic. Having all this on a single page helps creating clarity and alignment on the why, how, what and who of the work.

Kanban Thinking

This works well because it wraps all the elements of Kanban Thinking nicely. The results are equivalent to Impacts, the process improvement measures are ways to Sense capability, the strategies can be derived from exploring various Interventions and the tactics are the experiments created to Search the landscape. (Note: While all the examples I have seen have financial results, focussing on value based impacts, there is no reason why flow and potential based impacts could not be forecast with alternative results).

What I really like about Strategy Deployment, and the way Jackson describes it in his book, is that it is a form of nested experimentation. From an organisations long-term vision, through its strategy, to tactics and day to day operations and action, each level is a hypothesis of increasing granularity. As each experiment is run, the feedback and learning is used by the outer levels to  steer and adjust direction. Thus a learning organisation is created as the learning is passed around the organisation in a process known as ‘catchball’, and within this context, Kanban Thinking (and the Kanban Method) provides a synergistic means to running experiments and creating learning.

Do you know what results your organisation are aiming for? Do you know the strategies being used and how they should lead to the results? Do you know what improvement measures should indicate progress towards the results? Do you know how your tactical work implements the strategy and which indicators it should improve? Are all these elements treated as hypothesis and experiments to create feedback and learning with which to steer and adjust?

If you’d like help answering these questions, using the X-Matrix, let me know!

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.

Making System Interventions with Kanban Thinking

This post pulls together a number of ideas on interventions into a single place, and will become the content for a page on Interventions on the Kanban Thinking site.

What is an intervention?

An intervention is an act of becoming involved in something in order to have an influence on what happens. It is an active and participatory action, as opposed to a passive and observational instruction. Thus in Kanban Thinking, interventions are ways of interacting with a kanban system with the intent of improving it and having a positive impact.

There are 5 types of Kanban Thinking intervention, which can be considered as heuristics to help the discovery of appropriate practices and techniques for a system’s context. These heuristics may point to the purpose behind known and proven practices, or they may lead to the identification of new and alternative practices. They are:

  • Study the Context
  • Share the Understanding
  • Stabilise the System
  • Sense the Capability
  • Search the Landscape

Study the Context

What could be done to learn more about customer and stakeholder needs, the resultant demand and how that demand is processed?

Kanban Thinking is based on a philosophy of “start where you are now” and the foundation for this evolutionary approach is Studying the Context. In his book “The New Economics”, W. Edwards Deming famously said, “there is no substitute for knowledge”, and it is the acquisition of this knowledge about the current situation that leads to an appreciation of how to improve it.

Various practices are widely used to study different aspects of the system. Empathy Mapping is one way of learning more about customer and stakeholder needs. The work that they request as a result of those needs can be studied with demand analysis and profiling to determine classes of service and response. The way that work is then progressed, from concept to consumption, can be examined using forms of value stream mapping.

Share the Understanding

What information is important to share, and how can tokens, the inscriptions on them, and their placements, provide a single visual model?

Sharing the Understanding of the current situation, typically in the form of a kanban board, creates an environment where people are more intrinsically motivated. The ability to see what needs work provides autonomy, the ability to see where improvements can be made provides mastery, and the ability to see where to focus provides purpose.

Potentially, lots will have been learned from studying the context, so it is important to decide what is the most relevant information to share to avoid being overloaded with too much noise. That information can then be visualised using various patterns based on the acronym TIP; Token, Inscription, Placement. Tokens are the cards, stickies or other tangible representations of the work, where aspects such as shape, size, colour or material can represent different information. Inscriptions are items of information added onto the tokens, where words, dates, pictures or symbols can all be used with suitable formatting. Placements are the Tokens are placed on the board to convey information, where horizontal, vertical and relative positioning can all be meaningful.

Stabilise the Work

What policies could help limit work in process, and remove unnecessary or unexpected delays or rework?

A kanban system which is stable is more likely to be able to evolve and have resilience in the face of change. Systems can be considered to have boundaries or constraints, and those with too loose constraints will devolve into chaos, whereas those with too tight constraints will become brittle with bureaucracy. Stabilising the Work is achieved with enabling constraints, open enough to avoid restriction and prescription, yet limiting enough to stimulate expansion and new possibilities.

Defining work in process limits is a primary means of stabilising the work. One approach is to start with the current work in process (WIP), and look to gradually reduce it. Alternatively, the WIP could be drastically reduced to stabilise quickly, and then gradually increased to a more optimal level. A middle ground could be to base an initial WIP in the size of the team, such as one work item per person. How WIP is spread across the system is also a factor, from a single limit covering everything (CONWIP) to a different limit per stage or column.

WIP is a form of explicit policy, and other common forms are Definitions of Ready and Done and similar, simple quality criteria. Additionally, Test Driven Development can be considered an explicit policy on how software is written to create a stable code-base.

Sense the Capability

What measures and meetings might create insights and guide decisions on potential interventions?

As well as acquiring knowledge on what the work is, and how it gets done, it is also important to know how well it gets done. Sensing the Capability of a kanban system involves getting a feel for its performance by both measuring and interacting with it. Metrics provide an objective, quantative sense of capability. Meetings, and other feedback cadences, provide a subjective and qualitative sense of capability.

Measures should be derived from the desired impact, and the outcomes which would make the impact. If Flow is the desired impact, being more responsive might be a good outcome, and thus Lead Time might be a good measure. Additionally, the subsequent behaviours, both good and bad, which a measure might drive should be considered, and trade-offs can be made by having a set of balancing metrics. A focus on Lead Time might result in a reduction in Quality by cutting corners, so measuring Released Defects could help balance that trade-off.

Meetings provide a cadence with regular interactions can generate feedback. A simple metronomic cadence can tie various events such as planning, reviewing and retrospection to a single rhythm, or a polyrhythmic cadence can decouple these events into multiple rhythms. Another option is for some events to be asynchronous and triggered by the work rather than time-driven.

Search the Landscape

What small experiments could be run to safely learn the impact of different interventions?

Searching the Landscape of a kanban system involves looking at a range of possible interventions and experimenting to discover what impact they have. Those that have a positive impact should be pursued and amplified. Those that turn out to have a negative impact should be reversed and dampened. This searching can be thought of as exploring the evolutionary potential of the present state, as opposed to defining a future state and trying to move towards it.

Defining an experiment involves proposing a hypothesis that has a rationale behind it, can be measured in order to validate or falsify it, and can be easily recovered from in case of unanticipated results. The intentional act of documenting the experiment, using formats such as A3s, encourages disciplined thinking and avoids falling into the trap of retrospective coherence to explain results.

Searching the Landscape is an exercise in continual curiosity about how to evolve and improve the kanban system, increasing impact through further insights, interactions and interventions.

Making an Impact with Kanban Thinking

This post pulls together a number of ideas  on impact into a single place, and will become the content for a page in Impact on the Kanban Thinking site.

What is Impact

Outputs creates Outcomes which have Impact.

Designing a Kanban System involves the evolution and discovery of a good design. It cannot be pre-determined in advance. Thus instead of defining a future-state and working towards it, we start with the current-state and work away from it, exploring and assessing different alternatives. Each output of a design iteration will create different outcomes, and those that improve the system can be said to have a positive impact, while those that worsen the system have a negative impact.

Impact, therefore, describes the disposition of the system, or its tendency to behave in a certain way. Rather than defining a planned destination, impact points to the desired direction, such that we can check whether any changes are moving us towards or away from the direction we want to be heading. Impact can be assessed by using narrative techniques to capture stories about utopian (and dystopian) futures, and subsequently asking whether an outcome is likely to lead to more of the positive stories and fewer of the negative stories.

Describing Impacts

When imagining what impacts would be desirable, its easy for our experiences and biases to lead us to narrow our thinking and prematurely converge on only one particular type of impact. To avoid this, and encourage diversity in exploring a wide variety of potential impacts, Kanban Thinking describes three types to consider, giving different perspectives.

  • Flow. This is Doing the Thing Right. Stories will be primarily related to the process, efficiency and reliability.
  • Value. This is Doing the Right Thing. Stories will be primarily related to the product, effectiveness and validity.
  • Potential. This is Doing the Thing Sustainably. Stories will be primarily related to people, euphoria and flexibility.

Impacts as Triads

When exploring the impacts, it will become apparent that there is not always an obvious and neat mapping to either flow, value or potential. Thus, the three impacts can be thought of as a triad, with each being a vertex of a triangle.

Triads are concept I learned from Dave Snowden and used by the Cognitive Edge Sensemaker Suite (note that they have a patent associated with this), where a triangle is used as a measuring instrument to assess against three parameters. By using triads, impacts can be placed relative to where they have the strongest affinity, without having to decide on any one in particular. Imagine an impact being connected to each vertex with elastic. The greater the affinity to a vertex, the greater the tension, with the final position being a result of the combination of all three. Thus the story in the triad below has the strongest affinity with the Flow vertex. The next strongest is Potential, with Value being the weakest.

Impact Triad

While triads are an approach not directly supported by the canvas in its current form, the deliberate choice of words to describe each impact creates multiple possible triads which could be explored. Deciding where an impact goes generally requires more thinking, and generates greater dialogue and insight.

FlowValuePotential
Thing RightRight ThingThing Sustainably
ProcessProductPeople
ReliabilityValidityFlexibility
EfficiencyEffectivenessEuphoria

Generating lots of utopian (and dystopian) future stories, instrumented with these triads, will generate patterns which can give a sense of where the improvement opportunities are for making an impact.

Example

Here’s an example of thinking about impact from the three perspectives. It is intentionally lacking in direct relevance to minimise the risk of biasing your own answers to the questions.

When I go running, I’m generally wanting to improve my health and fitness. What impact do I want to have?

  • From a Flow perspective, impact could be about pace and speed. I could imagine a utopian future where I can run a 4 minute mile.
  • From a Value perspective, impact could be about distance and stamina. I could imagine a utopian future where I can run 100 miles.
  • From a Potential perspective, impact could be about friendship and community. I could imagine a utopian future where I am the president of a local running club.

None of these are mutually exclusive. If I can run a 4 minute mile, then there is a high likelihood that I’ll be involved in a running club, and training longer distances as well. However, explicitly exploring the different perspectives avoids me just focussing on one thing such as speed, to the detriment of friendship or stamina.

What stories would you like to tell about the impact your kanban system makes in the future?