Dagens Industri has written an article about my current client RPS – Rikspolisstyrelsen (the Swedish national police board). During the past 6 months I’ve been working with them to implement a Kanban-based software development process in a 60-person project. Our aim is to equip every police car with a laptop & mobile connection to the HQ, so that police can stay on the field instead of having to drive to the station and do backoffice work for every prosecution. The first pilot was released last summer and now, after a series of bi-monthly releases, it is being rolled out to thousands of police cars throughout the whole country.
This project is a milestone at RPS due to the short delivery time, the overwhelmingly positive response from users, and the surpringly low number of defects and support issues, especially considering the complexity of the product (LOTS of systems to integrate). I’m very impressed by the competence and teamwork of the people involved in this project. Simple process metrics show that they within 4 months managed to double velocity and cut cycle time in half, probably mostly due to improved collaboration and focus.
I’m planning to write an article "Lean from the trenches" describing some of the stuff we’ve been doing and what we’ve learned along the way – for example how to scale kanban and how to use simple techniques to improve collaboration between different disciplines.
Our project is described on page 18 in the DI Lean special issue (in Swedish though).
