PR 71 - Using Kanban for ITSM & Operations

Being able to visualize work and create transparency is the beginning of improvement One of the major tenants of Lean thinking is the principle of Jidoka, which means “making the invisible visible”. Creating transparency in how work is received and completed is a critical step in order to understand, measure and improve. This reality has given rise to the Lean practices of Visual Management or as one organization I know likes to call it: “Working Out Loud.” In this session George and I are talking with our return guest J. Paul Reed about his views and experiences of how a Kanban Board allows organizations to create transparency into work, provide key metrics such as Lead and Cycle Time, identify Bottlenecks and quickly act on visual cues to improve throughput.

The Kanban board is one of the most widely adopted Lean tools and has become popular with the Agile and DevOps movements and is now finding its way into IT Service Management and Operations processes. Join George, Paul and I as we explore this topic and provide examples of how Kanban enables IT teams to improve visibility into both planned and unplanned work and how it ultimately helps teams by honouring reality.

George’s, Paul’s & Troy’s thoughts what are yours? "I find that when you open the door toward openness and transparency, a lot of people will follow you through." ~Kirsten Gillibrand
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Show Notes

  • Guest: J. Paul Reed
  • Kanban - Origins Toyota Production System & Lean Thinking
  • Kanban - Make work visible and focus on the flow
  • Challenge was how to use a Kanban for un-planned work
  • Agile and DevOps leverage Visual Management and Kanban boards to visualize work in progress
  • Using Kanban when a team is distributed or virtual
  • The focus is how is working flowing, where are the bottlenecks?
  • Unplanned work often is what consumes the majority of existing capacity, Kanban makes this visible
  • Kanban allows you to honour reality
  • Kanban is the only place where all work is visible - (The Lean principle of Jidoka)
  • What is not understood / defined cannot be stabilized, measured, improved
  • Kanban improves flow by limiting Work In Progress and increasing throughput
  • The cost of task switching (every time you interrupt someone writing code you loose 1/2 hour)
  • Even machines suffer from Context Switching
  • Discounting the myth of unlimited capacity
  • Taiichi Ohno "Let the flow manage the process and not management manage the flow"
  • Kanban scales very well to groups or scales down to individual work
  • Scrumban
  • Using Agile - Scrum and Kanban for Request Fulfilment
  • Using Kanban for 1x1 and explaining unplanned work
  • Value Stream Maps vs Kanban Boards
  • Can you use Scrum for Unplanned work?
  • Kanban can be used for both Planned and Unplanned work
  • How do you do Kanban wrong? (Organization’s with a blame and shame culture)
  • If Kanban does not have Work In Progress limits it has limited value
  • Personal Kanban
  • Using Kanban boards for personal life (MediaBan, ChoreBan,….)

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