“I’m a project manager and my company is adopting Kanban. What does this mean for me?” “I’ve always associated Kanban with continuous flow. How can it help us deliver projects?” “We’ve visualized our work with Kanban, but I’ve heard experts say it’s effective in forecasting and managing risk. Can you explain?”
This workshop answers these and many other questions. The common theme is: Kanban gives project managers powerful tools for managing risk. You’ll learn these tools and thinking through a series of focused, interactive group exercises during this workshop.
We’ll start by modeling project delivery with Kanban systems and gathering appropriate Kanban metrics. Then we’ll use the metrics create inexpensive (in terms of time and effort needed) forecasting models for our upcoming projects. Such models are something every project manager could do when they initiate their next project. We’ll finally cover the problems of capacity allocation, scheduling and sequencing work, and effective feedback loops to help throughout project execution.
Approximate timeline (4 hours with breaks after 90 minute sections)::
- Quick reminders about Kanban system design and mechanics
- Exercise: advanced demand analysis
- Measuring lead time, Little’s Law
- Exercise: capacity allocation
- Break
- Scaling Up to Large Projects
- Exercise: Staffing. Use Little’s Law, lead time data, requirement sampling, dark matter estimate, Z-curve, proposed timeline to figure out the staffing for the project. (In the Advanced Kanban class, this is a presentation section. We should do an exercise in the workshop).
- Market Risk of Change
- Exercise: Selection. Describe some sample requirements for a project. Tag them by risk category. Decide on the order you would start them. Explain the sequence.
- Another break here
- Exercise: Scheduling and Dynamic WIP constraints.
