evolutionary kanban - channel the pain
DESCRIPTION
At the agile prague conference on 15th of sept. 2013 I presented about some aspects of our evolutionary Kanban approach at the mobile.de mobile app teams. You can find the slide at the end of this post. Without a little context than what is visible on the slides it is hard to get idea. So I’ve chosen to put some text first. A few words about my background: I love XP and the software craftmanship movement. I am working with Scrum and especially Kanban a lot. I used to be a Java Developer, now working as a dev manager, sometimes switching to the agile coach hat. Last 2 years I have had the honour to build up different dev teams at mobile.de. We used an evolutionary approach to build up our process. When building up the team the first thing I concentrated on was flow. Without flow and a basic understanding of this concept you won’t get anywhere. There have to be a lot of different absolutely necessary elements to get successful teams, like purpose, fun, innovation and craftsmanship. These are not covered here so much. Usually flow is visualized as a nice, slow, peaceful floating river. That provides a good feeling right? I like to look at it more like that: you are in the middle of a dangerous, unknown, wild river in the mountains. You can be thrown with full force against big stones. That causes pain, right? Or you don’t move at all, that is at least boring. So what means pain in our agile product delivery context? Blocked Stories and inefficiency in general. Nobody wants to be inefficient. So pain means: I cannot finish what I have started. For continuous improvements, for getting better step by step you first have to find and feel the pain. Teams, managers usually really like to work around these pain points – but that is a false understanding of efficiency. If you can’t remove the pain within the team, you have to channel it back to where it belongs. Feeling the pain is necessary for change! The good thing is: you can change - your team and even the environment. Work in Progress (WIP) Limits show the pain. They are your weapon against wrong efficiency towards Kaizen, towards continuous improvement. In the presentation there are some examples of of challenges and what have been improvements to our way of working and how we are working with others.TRANSCRIPT
Evolu&onary Kanban channel the pain Holger Hammel mobile.de / ebay
XP
Scrum Kanban
Java Dev
Agile Coach Dev Manager
20min 1 thought
Purpose CraAmanship
Fun
InnovaDon
Flow
[HO]
[PL]
Pain Blocked Stories
Inefficiency
Find the pain and channel it
[MK]
That’s the thought!
Kanban and WIP Limits
show the pain enable change
Example: requirement issues
A story from PO is unclear and has a lot of requirements => development stops
Cannot start a new story, because of WIP limit
Who should feel the pain? the team
change the way of working
don’t plan early smaller stories
explicit communicaDon analyze risk
menDon refactorings get reliable
[JH]
Example: external dependencies
A different department of your company has to bring stories on your board.
The interacBon to their systems fails oCen. Hard to get support when needed
Their stories block all the Bme
Who should feel the pain? they
channel the pain
Use big red BLOCKED cards Invite to your daily standup
Insist on support the Dme the feature is developed descope blocking stories and escalate
Understand flow
Courage to change
Find the pain and channel it
[MK]
That’s the thought again!
• Part of the ebay family • located ebay Campus Dreilinden • Germany’s biggest online marketplace for vehicles • 7.44 million unique users (AGOF 2013-04) • 150 people, 60 within technology • High traffic web, android and iOS applications • Agile cross functional teams
Holger Hammel [email protected] - @mobilep2
Image sources • [PL]: Philip Larson -‐ h\p://www.flickr.com/photos/philiplarson/
person in river • [MK]: Marvin Kuo -‐ h\p://www.flickr.com/photos/marvinkuo/
Pain • [JH]: Jimbohayz-‐ h\p://www.flickr.com/photos/jameshayphotography/
Stop signs all creaDve commons, free for commercial use all other images are mine :)