Kanban, Lean and Agile mysteries
Blog Authors
I just got back from Agile Islands 2019. I really encourage people who haven’t been there to pay it a visit. It’s refreshing to get back with a new insight and idea every time I visit the conference.
Anyway: Here are the slides from my presentation
Let me also share the workshop kit I used.
How do you grow, innovate, and deliver – at the same time? AID (Audi’s unit for self-driving cars) uses Agile to build its organisation at the same pace as their product. We interviewed their CEO Karlheinz Wurm on why they have chosen to do so. We also sneaked in a question – how is it (really) to get feedback as a leader?
Consumer behaviors are transforming and the speed of IT development is accellerating. Launching new products is becoming ever easier. This means new challenges – and new opportunities – for marketing departments. The companies that learn to master Agile marketing, in a faster changing world, stands a better chance of building long-lasting relationships with their customers.
Innovative companies like Zalando and Telenor are already applying Agile tools inside marketing. However, what is Agile marketing all about? In this article we’ve summarised the key ingredients:
Read the full article here “Agile marketing in a nutshell”
Manager 1: “We should adopt scaling framework Y.”
Manager 2: “But scaling framework Y doesn’t have a recipe for baking cookies. So we need to do X.”
Manager 3: “Whut? You’re both wrong. We have Agile teams. We’re good!”
In fact, each statement above can be wrong. So the question is, how would you know?
As a coach, it never ceases to surprise me how often management teams lack a shared understanding of their current state of tech operations. If members of a leadership team do not share a common understanding of the current state, it’s easy to fall into the traps of process religion (“my tool is better than yours”), or status quo bias (“why change? From my perspective, everything seems just fine”), or just sheer complacency, “I don’t need to improve, they do”. One piece of solid advice, the last thing you want to do as the leader is to be oblivious to the current state of affairs.
My preferred method of learning the current state is to always start with an “outside-in” view. Assume your operations are a black box and look at the output first, then delve into how the cogs operate inside. Answering these 10 questions helps you do that:
Of course, you don’t need to answer all the questions above. But getting the facts on the table is the key to building a shared understanding of where you are at, so the management team can start to pull in the same direction when improving.
In the scaled Agile framework, one key role is the Release Train Engineer (RTE). But who should I look for to fill this role? What are the first few process improvements experienced RTE’s typically do? Yuval Yeret (AgileSparks) and Mattias Skarin (Crisp) took the time to discuss the traits of a good RTE.
Yuval: The easy answer to this question is that you are looking for a Scrum master for a team of teams. Going beyond that, when it comes to specific traits, you are looking for someone who cares about process and improvements, someone who has the ability to orchestrate things. But at the same time, someone who also knows when to step back and let the teams organize themselves. A good RTE is a great communicator and can see and understand what is happening.
Mattias: Firstly, a good RTE should be a people person, someone you’d like to talk to and bounce ideas with. Someone who builds trust and energy with their presence. In essence, a good RTE is the Uber Scrum master across teams. Secondly, a good RTE is systematic and makes sure the process events are run and planned in advance. Thirdly, a good RTE should be a good problem solver.
Åland has one of the coolest visions out there – build an Agile society. They also arrange Agile Islands, a small conference but with sharp content. This year I had the pleasure to speak, so I decided to shed some light on “Decision making under uncertainty”, which is a fascinating subject. Here are the slides.
Cheres
Mattias
What happens when you use Agile in marketing? Zalando have been using Lean and Agile tools inside marketing for some time. That makes up an unique and interesting case study, from a company pushing the boundaries.
Here’s an interview with Julia Kummel, sharing their experiences from the journey:
psst: Do you want to learn how to get started with Agile in marketing? Try out brand new Agile Marketing class in September.
/Mattias
Racing is essentially product development on steroids.
For a number of years I’ve been following the development of a promising young racing driver – Linus Lundqvist. Anyone with a little bit of knowledge about racing,knows that there are many components that need to work together, in order to forge success. Talant – yes. Resources – yes. But – as important – is how you put them to use. Here’s where Lean and Agile thinking comes into play.
We got the chance to interview Linus and his race engineer at LL Motorsports, Bo Hanner, on how they have used Lean and Agile thinking, in order to keep an edge on competition.
Where is Linus now? While it still early in the season and many races to go, Linus has put himself in a favourable position, as a frontrunner in the Formula 3 UK championship.
If you would like to dig deeper and learn how a race team works, or how they use Lean/Agile to keep an edge on competition, then take the chanse and meet Linus and LL motorsports here in Stockholm on October the 18:th, at the “Agile Procurement for Business Agility” conference.
Yep! The collection of Kanban boards now is now available in french. Big thanks to Nicolas Mereaux who made it happen!
Here’s the link to “10 tableaux kanban et leur contexte” (fr).
(the english 1.5v is available here )
Yuval is coming to Stockholm to teach a Scaled Agile class (Implementing SAFe) in January. I know Yuval from the Kanban community from a number of years back. We invited him because we know he shares the same pragmatic view on things as we do in Crisp. We made the interview in order for our audience to got to know him a little bit. I could think of no better way than putting him on the spot with a few tricky questions 🙂
Among them:
A key quote from the interview:
“If you don’t pay attention to the principles, the practices applied will deteriorate to ‘for show’
Not every company starts from a green field. Many carry legacy. So how do you kickstart Agile and get traction in an organisation with scale? We can learn lessons from SimCorp, a successful provider for asset management solutions, who runs 500 developers across 4 sites and went from 0 to 8 release trains in 14 months. Here’s their story.
with Neil Cook
with Mattias Skarin
with Jan Grape
psst: If you’d like to learn how you can get traction with your own Scaled Agile transition, join our “Implementing SAFe SPC4 class” in January 23-26. We have handpicked trainers with deep Agile experiences for the class, trainers that shares our pragmatic mindset. You’ll also meet me and Jan Grape, so lots of opportunities to discuss Scaling challenges, regardless of you favourite choice of approach. Ds.
Just got back from Athens and Devops Greece where I talked about “Using Kanban in the field, and how we got management buy in to do so”
Two key takaways are:
How do you leapfrog a successful waterfall company into Scaled Agile? How do you transition into Agile when you have legacy?
When your company is already successful in what it does and when it carries legacy, transitioning into Agile is a more complex challenge than starting off Agile in a green field environment. After all, companies that are successful in what they do (one way or another) tend to carry legacy. So we need to learn to improve in this kind of scenario too.
In this case study, I’ll walk through the steps SimCorp took to shift into Scaled Agile and the challenges they faced. You will also find deeper insights, such as how you can find your value streams, how we worked with the portfolio roadmap and some of the behavior shifts we look for when transitioning into a Lean/Agile environment.
You can download the case study here.
I frequently get the question (often from people outside IT): “how can I quickly understand what Agile is?”. I’ve collected a suite of links and videos over the years to help people grasp the basics concepts in 10 min or so. I thought I’d share them with you.
(pls note: the list is intended to give people a quick introduction, short and sweet. The intent is not to cover all aspects.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-lavaMkxU&t=3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502ILHjX9EE
https://www.infoq.com/articles/modern-agile-intro
https://blog.crisp.se/2016/04/04/mattiasskarin/12-seemingly-normal-things-agile-people-do
– Pay attention to how engagement/responsiblity was created for both team and department deliveries, and how positive energy was nurtured.
I hope you find it useful. I expect this list to evolve over time, so don’t be surprised if new links pop up here in the future.
Cheers Mattias
Karlstad sjukhus har i flera omgångar byggts om och byggt ut. Samtliga hus har levererats på tid, budget och med en fungerande vårdverksamhet från dag 1. Sjukhuset har sparat 300 miljoner åt Värmlands läns landsting. Lösningen? Effektstyrd upphandling med Agila kontrakt och Partnering. Vad skapade förutsättningarna för att lyckas? Vi intervjuade Lars Nilsson, som ledde upphandlingen av Karlstad sjukhus.
(How Karlstad hospital was built on time, on budget and with working medicare from day 1, using Agile contracts). Read the interview here (in swedish)
http://agilakontrakt.se/hur-karlstad-sjukhus-upphandlades-med-ratt-effekt-pa-tid-och-budget-del-1
Last month, we had the pleasure of bringing Stephen Bungay to Crisp in Stockholm to share with us his wisdom and insights on how to use Strategy under uncertain conditions.
I find this topic interesting, since the interative nature of Agile can trick management into believing either that they do not need to have a direction, or that a few abstract statements would serve the purpose.
In my mind, nothing can be further from the truth. In a dynamic, fast paced environment, more attention needs to be focused on finding, communicating and revising your direction. The question then becomes, “How can we do a good job of it?” Stephen has studied how leaders do this (from the military to Formula 1) and has translated the strategies to fast-paced business environments. Interestingly, he notes, “Strategy is not a science. It’s a practice, which each generation needs to rediscover.” I think we would do well to do the same within Agile environments.
Apart from Stephen’s “Art of Action” class, which was highly recommended, we also hosted an open evening on the topic “Keeping Direction” which combined the practical experiences from LEGO with Stephen Bungay’s insights. The slides for the talks are available in PDF from the links below:
.
Also check out Sami’s excellent podcast with Stephen at http://www.bosslevelpodcast.com/stephen-bungay-and-strategy-under-uncertainty)
Cheers
Mattias
During extraordinary situations and crises, some people stand out and shine. One of these was Lottie Knutson. Lottie led the Crisis team at Fritidsresor during the Tsunami disaster in 2004. While governments were struggling to figure out what had happened, Lottie’s team was already hitting the ground running.
Lottie will be speaking at Fast Feedback 2016, in Stockholm on Sept 21st-22nd. She will be sharing her insights and experience on how to prepare a leadership team for uncertain and critical events. We got a chance to talk with her.
The fall has just started with board meetings and travel. I’ve decided to eat more greens (vegetables) and to do more walking. For the walking, my new favorite app, BBC World News, will come in handy.
Lessons learned from quick change and dealing with crises at work.
The importance of being unpretentious, and how not to be fazed by the constant battle with internal bureaucracy and politics.
Thanks Lottie! Looking forward to seeing you at Fast Feedback.
Hi!
I’ve updated the Kanban boards collection with examples from departements outside IT, Product portfolio and Corporate Legal.
Hi!
Here’s the video of our presentation “Learnings from SAFe @ LEGO” at LKCE 2015.
psst: Meet LEGO f2f at this years Fastfeedback conference 2016 (Stockholm, Sept 21-22:nd). This years focus topic is “Strategy – Turning insight to action”.
Cheers
Mattias
OK, technically speaking, it was called a networking day. But that wouldn’t do justice to the content here.
The main thing we got out of the ACPN Agile contracting conference was the three different perspectives from lawyers, customers and providers. That gave us a unique insight into the challenges and questions from each party.
Some cool facts:
Insights and reflections from the conference:
If you want to read more about the conference and including a short video summary – check out:
The conference was organized by Crisp & Nordic River (Sweden), Best Brains (Denmark) and Codento (Finland).
Last week, I got this great question from Faraz (a manager for an energetic customer support crew) who is experimenting a lot with getting more Agile. “What seemingly normal things do Agile people do?” I realized that we rarely talk about the small things that effective Agile people do. What makes a great difference is rarely the big sweeping change programs, but rather, the small everyday things we do without thinking about it.
So here’s a list of 12 seemingly normal things Agile people do which we don’t pay much attention to that can make a big difference.
Hi!
I recently did a podcast together with Dennis (CIO Nordnet) on #slowtofast. I walked into the podcast thinking it was going to be about Kanban and Enterprise Agile. Right! 🙂 Dennis hit me with these simple questions..
All hard questions, and all so essential to get right. Here is the podcast:
If you are into Product managment and UX you’ll find more interesting topics in Marcus and Dennis podcast Slowtofast.
Cheers
Mattias
The Kanban and Scrum minibook is now available with Polish translation. Great thanks to Zbigniew Zemla for the translation!
Pobierz tutaj (aka polish for “get it here” ):
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook
Cheers
Mattias
I recently recorded a webinar where I walk through 5 ways to find slack (to invest in critical improvements), when a team is under high pressure.
Enjoy!
http://leankit.com/blog/2015/11/real-world-kanban/
Hi!
Here’s the video me and Eik’s presentation – “Learnings from SAFe @LEGO” (presentation at LKCE – Lean Kanban Central Europe, Nov 2015).
Best quote: “..this looks exacly like what my 6 year son does in kindergarden” 🙂
Cheers
Mattias
Just back from Lean Kanban Central Europe 2015. A great conference that keeps pushing the limits.
At the conference I gave a talk together with Eik aka “Captain Agile” from LEGO. We walked through how they introduced SAFe, how they involved other departments and most important, how they experimented their way forward. (Me and Henrik iterated as coaches during the transition).
Here are the slides.
Cheers
Mattias
InfoQ has just released an interview regarding my latest book Real World Kanban. In this we walk through the reasons behind writing the book plus why Kanban needs to be matched by long term thinking to improve over time (aka behaviours like “don’t pass bad quality forward” matters)
Check it out: http://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-real-world-kanban
ps: For anyone interested in the book, I have also collected quotes from people who have read it (among them Mary “The Queen of Lean” Poppendieck)