The greatest benefits from adopting the Kanban Method rely on leaders helping teams and organisations adopt not just a new set of behaviours but also a different set of values and beliefs about people and how they work (double loop learning). Producing these double-loop changes requires that Leaders are able to reason and communicate productively, even in the face of personal and organizational defensive routines.
This practically-focused tutorial will provide participants with an opportunity to reflect on their own communication skills in key real-world scenarios encountered when using the Kanban Method in teams and organisations. The tutorial is based on the Mutual Learning Model, developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon. It will cover tools such as the Ladder of Inference, the Left Hand Right Hand Case Study approach as well as effective behaviours like balancing advocacy and inquiry.
The results from using the Mutual Learning Model are faster and better quality decisions, higher level of commitment from groups and individuals to take action, more effective information exchange and higher level of trust, openness and productive amongst team members.
Management support is vital to a successful Kanban adoption. In order to support your Kanban intiative, the savvy manager will want to understand what Kanban is, and the associated risks, costs, and benefits. They will have questions, such as:
- What is Kanban, and how is it different from other methods that I am familiar with, such as Scrum and waterfall?
- What organisational changes do we need to make to adopt Kanban?
- What are the goals and expected benefits of Kanban?
- What are some successful adoption strategies?
- What are the risks associated with adopting Kanban?
- Can you provide me some case studies of both successful and failed Kanban initiatives, and the factors contributing to these outcomes?
- What metrics can we collect with Kanban, and how can we use them to understand and improve our delivery of value to our customers?
- What is my role? What can I do as a manager to ensure our success?
This tutorial will provide you with answers to these questions and more. You will take away resources you can use directly to inform your management of what Kanban is, and how it will help your team or organisation improve. You will be able to demonstrate how Kanban can improve predictability and transparency, provoke change, highlight systemic weaknesses, and form the foundation for a process of real continuous improvement.
Strategic Innovation on Demand: The Science-Based “How-To” for Creating Sustainable Advantage and Growth
Not all innovations are created equal! While the majority result in financial losses
(76 %, Harvard), very few (under 1%) create market growth (Frost & Sullivan).
They are termed Strategic Innovations. No longer, your firm has to be a part of
this statistics! With the emergence of the General Theory of Innovation (GTI), the
only prescriptive scientific theory of innovation, strategic innovations can be
created on demand and in any market generating growth to their creators!
By attending this seminar, you will learn the step-by-step methodology (called the Design
for Advantage™) that increase any firms’ probability of creating strategic
innovations to 60 percent, thereby skewing the odds to favor those who master this
approach. You will learn all the details (the background theory, processes,
tools, principles, etc.) hands-on, with extended real-life examples, participate
in numerous workshops and exercises, and master take-home tools you can use
right away.
Building on your basic experience with Cumulative Flow Diagrams (CFDs) on recent projects, we'll
first look closer at the "link" between CFD’s and Little's Law and discuss: the underlying required conditions (assumptions), and explore workflow policies that support these conditions. If these conditions don’t exist, there has to be implications, right? From there, we’ll look at analysis performed on
several “real” project data sets (each representing 15 - 18 months), starting with developing a preliminary data distribution table, then refining it to derive actual-based t-shirt sizes and initial “low-effort to produce” but meaningful (probabilistic) SLAs. Could this help to develop policies to guide “sizing” of work items, or help determine the effectiveness of changes you make to policies going forward?
We’ll continue the earlier refinement process looking next at percentiles, and then, using parametric
statistics including exploring benefits of utilizing a data transformation for data sets that are log-normally distributed. Is it necessary to consider whether data is normally distributed or not, and how would you learn if it really makes a difference in your context?
Along the way, we’ll explore the resulting control charts created and learn how they can help identify
outliers and provide a basis for determining which “problem” work items might actually be “normal” (a frequent occurrence), and which might truly be “unusual” (unlikely to occur). Would this be helpful in how you might develop polices and processes to manage “problem” work items through your workflow, or
in developing specific and direct risk mitigation strategies or tactics? We’ll close by plotting trends of various analyses performed (counts, average lead and cycle times, standard deviations, distraction frequencies, etc.) and then pull it all together at the end to see how the analysis above might help
determine expected throughput and forecast completion times for your projects.
IT Operations & Services teams are often plagued by problems related to the constant flood of demands for their time.
This 1-day workshop covers how the Kanban Method can help Ops teams balance that demand against their capability to deliver.
Teams who build and maintain software systems can realize many benefits from a strong alliance with internal and external customers - we'll look at how using a service-delivery approach can help unify teams and promote cross-functional collaboration.
The following topics will be covered:
- Specialization and bottlenecks
- Dependencies on external groups
- Interlude from never-ending work
- Early input mechanisms
- Variable task size
- Interrupt driven work
Are you or people in your organization feeling overwhelmed with their workload? Do they feel they are not getting the results they want from the actions they are taking? Does everything seem urgently important?
Personal Kanban gives clarity to our work and our lives by visualizing those tasks, expectations, and commitments we have and helping us prioritize and complete them effectively. With only two simple rules, visualize your work and limit your work in progress, Personal Kanban is flexible enough to have already been in contexts as diverse as pre-school classes to Fortune 10 companies.
This workshop is for individuals who want to create more value for their organizations and themselves through improved personal performance. It is based on the popular book Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry.
Participants will apply Kanban and other techniques to manage their own work, and by extension to teams. Each person will design and learn how to use their own activity board.
Topics include:
- Visualizing work to uncover bottlenecks, gain clarity and peace of mind
- The damaging effects of too much work-in-progress, and how to reduce its effects
- Prioritize work so the important isn’t crowded out by the “urgent”
- The power of slack time!
- Continuous improvement that actually works
- Minimizing distractions using the Pomodoro technique
Is it fun?
The workshop is lively, interactive, with lots of variety to maximize learning potential. Gerry co-designed this session using the Training From the Back of the Room approach, which uses brain science principles to make learning stick.
What will I gain from attending?
You will leave this one day workshop with:
- Increased visibility into what you are doing - what you can see you can manage
- Practical answers on how to spend more time on the things that matter most to you
- Lightweight processes and tools you can use and adapt immediately to manage your workload
- A ready to use personal Kanban board
Performance occurs at many levels: organization, team and individual, starting with the individual. High performing companies embrace all three to reap the rewards of excellence. Executives, managers, staff, entrepreneurs, busy moms can all benefit from this workshop.
Reviews from Participants
"Creative, engaging, productive."
"The workshop is a fun ride through several Agile techniques that I can turn around and put to use right away!"
"Attend the workshop. It allows you to reflect on where you can make personal effectiveness improvements and teaches you how to do it."
"Now I can see better what I need to do and have a flexible means to manage my work."
"I plan to have my team participate in this exercise."
Strategic Innovation on Demand: The Science-Based “How-To” for Creating Sustainable Advantage and Growth
Not all innovations are created equal! While the majority result in financial losses
(76 %, Harvard), very few (under 1%) create market growth (Frost & Sullivan).
They are termed Strategic Innovations. No longer, your firm has to be a part of
this statistics! With the emergence of the General Theory of Innovation (GTI), the
only prescriptive scientific theory of innovation, strategic innovations can be
created on demand and in any market generating growth to their creators!
By attending this seminar, you will learn the step-by-step methodology (called the Design
for Advantage™) that increase any firms’ probability of creating strategic
innovations to 60 percent, thereby skewing the odds to favor those who master this
approach. You will learn all the details (the background theory, processes,
tools, principles, etc.) hands-on, with extended real-life examples, participate
in numerous workshops and exercises, and master take-home tools you can use
right away.