Martine Devos' two day Introduction to Kanban workshop provides you with an introduction to Lean, Kanban and Pull Systems. The workshop will teach you how an established industrial engineering theory can be applied to software development process.

Kanban turns the winning ideas from Lean Production and the Toyota-Production-System (famous as TPS) into successful practices for the software development.

Kanban defines two key rules:

1. Pull principle - each process takes work from the previous process in order to prevent overloading.
2. Work in progress is limited so that no expensive stock is created

In this Kanban workshop, you will learn how Kanban can be introduced into existing software development environments and also how it works in an organization with a strong division of labour. You will also learn how Kanban provides a useful perspective of the entire value chain, going beyond pure software development, from envisioning right through to operations.

This workshop consists of equal parts: an experiential exercise, the theory and its application.

1. Kanban Experience - an exercise in 5 parts which demonstrates applying Kanban from a “manufacturing” environment to software development.
2. Understanding Kanban -- why it works and how it works (theory)
3. Group work (application -- building a Kanban and writing a report)

Introduction

• Introduction to Lean
• What is a Kanban system – examples
• Background and history of applying a Kanban system to software engineering

Recipe for Success (and outline for remainder of class)

• Focus on Quality
• Limit Work-in-Progress
• Balance Demand against Throughout
• Prioritization

Case Examples
Value Stream Mapping and Tracking

• Define customer-valued work items (deliverables)
• Value-stream map
• Work item tracking (manual and electronic)
• Daily standup meetings
• Kanban boards
• Sticky Buddy when working remotely

Exercise – Tracking Value Delivery
Qualities of Service

• Types of work items
• Expediting (“Silver Bullets”)
• Policies for processing work items

Exercise – add Classes of Service and Policies
Kaizen Culture

• Meaning of Kaizen
• Trust and transparency
• Alignment
• Focus on Value Delivery
• Empowerment, Delegation (Self-organization)
• Servant Leadership

WIP

• Setting Kanban limits

Bottlenecks

• Identifying bottlenecks
• Capacity constrained resources
• Non-instant availability resources
• Improving throughput

Exercise – Kanban Limits and Constraint Management
Examples of variants on Kanban systems
Scaling Kanban

• Standup meetings
• Swim Lanes

Release Cadence

• Technical transaction costs of release
• Customer transaction costs of release
• Market variation and demand for releases

Prioritization Cadence

• Feeding the input queue
• Transaction costs of item selection and prioritization

Service Level Agreements

• Determining a service level agreement
• Monitoring due date performance

Exercise – Release and Prioritization Cadence Selection
Metrics and Reporting

• WIP - Cumulative flow
• Lead Time
• Waste Lead Time : Touch Time
• Open Issues and Blocked Work Item

Exercise – Metrics and Reporting
Gaming the System

• Collaborative Game Theory
• Kanban system robustness to gaming
• Prioritization policies to prevent gaming
• Expediting and how to avoid too many Silver Bullets
• Building trust through collaboration

Exercise – Reflection “Where can you use Kanban?”

• Is Kanban for you?
• Lead Time
• Waste Lead Time : Touch Time
• And where would you introduce it first?