Kanban in Biotech: An Enterprise Kanban Case Study
What is the most important cell in the human body? The CEO asked the senior managers this question on the company's first day with Kanban.
This is the story of a biopharmaceutical company founded in the early 2000s and headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia. Being much smaller than the Big Pharma companies, it found its edge in oncology, hematology, treatment of autoimmune diseases and its world-class clinical research program. Still growing and with hundreds of employees in many locations and over 20 research labs, this is a very complex organization. Seeking new improvement ideas, the company turned to the Kanban method.
Even though this Kanban journey is a very recent development, it has already produced many great stories worth sharing. Some of them are humorous. The very first Kanban board actually fell from the wall, overburdened with Post-Its. Many others are deeper stories demonstrating Kanban application with organizational impact. They have a common theme: people across the company getting better at managing the unpredictable flow of intellectual work, essential to success in their complex business.
The answer to the question about the most important cell turned out to be a powerful lesson in modern management We'll save it until the end.
Featuring: A special biotechnology version of the GetKanban game
Presenters:• Evgenia Ovchinnikova
• Alexei Zheglov, KCP, AAKT, Principal Consultant, Lean A-to-Z
Personally I find it very hard to imagine a situation where I would not use Kanban to drive improvement. The 6 core practices represent a set of game changing beliefs that apply equally well in organizations that want nothing but “Scrum by the book”, those that work with stage gate models and even startups that want to validate learning faster than their competitors.
So why is it that less than 10 percent of those using “Kanban” are actively limiting WIP, why is flow still poorly understood and managed and why do most only scratch the surface of true continuous improvement? This talk is about getting back to basics and getting Kanban right. How you can and should leverage the huge potential of the core practices and how simple techniques can help you get on the right track before diving into the endless complexity that lies beyond.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes was a rogue smith and bandit who invited travellers to rest in his “perfectly sized bed.” When they accepted, he forcibly bound them to it, then stretched them or cut off various body parts until they “perfectly” fit the bed.
Too many organizations have a single model of standard practice to which they try to fit all their projects. Development and acquisition organizations are finding that competitive success requires diverse systems that are a mix of high security assurance components, opaque and dynamic COTS products and cloud services, highly useful but kaleidoscopic apps and widgets, and further success-critical developed or outsourced capabilities. Approaching such systems with a one-size-fits-all process approach often results in painful Procrustean outcomes.
The incremental Commitment Spiral Model (ICSM) is not a one-size-fits-all process approach, but a process generator that enables an organization to determine and evolve the best-fit process for each project based on its primary opportunities and risks. It uses some diagrams to provide some helpful process views, but is primarily driven by four key principles that largely overlap with Lean principles.
The presentation will summarize the problems of Procrustean one-size-fits-all process approaches, present the ICSM principles and process views, and provide examples of projects that illustrate the results of following or disregarding the principles.
10 years ago Ultimate Software began its transition from a traditional Waterfall development process to the Agile model we use today. As we moved from Scrum to Kanban (and in some cases, back to Scrum again) we uncovered a consistent thread in our decision making – most decisions were based not on data, but on gut feel. Over time we recognized that instinct simply wasn’t good enough. So we decided that a data-driven approach was not only necessary, but essential to creating a culture of success.
Today the teams at Ultimate have boiled down data representations and charts into simple, tile-based scorecards. These cards can be used by both internals and externals to quickly assess the health of the team and the products they are developing at a glance. The end result of this approach has been a 35% improvement in throughput for Q1 this year, as well as a far greater sense of ownership at the team level.
This talk will walk attendees through the common challenges faced by an enterprise-sized adoption of Agile and how Ultimate has used data to confront these challenges head-on. We will also demonstrate how Ultimate’s teams have used standard cumulative flow diagrams and scatterplots to take regular “temperature checks,” at both the story and the portfolio level. Additionally, we will cover how our major ceremonies have been adapted to bring data into our decision making process. Finally, we will share our next generation of team scoreboards, which not only show team wins or loses but also what we need to do to ensure Ultimate stays in the green.
Your team has been using Kanban, you have seen some improvements and you are finding new challenges that stress you out. There are WIP limits but they are being broken. There is work on the kanban board, just not all of it. Work is flowing but the board isn't updated. You forecast cycle times and you get bombarded with requests for estimates.
Old habits are hard to break and you, as a coach or as a leader, want to encourage gradual, collaborative change even if you feel like saying, "Just do it!"
Learn how a coaching mindset improves day-to-day Kanban practices.
What is Scrumban and how do I use it?
When Scrumban was introduced it was presented as a way to apply the Kanban Method to transition software development teams from pure Scrum to a more evolved development framework.
Over the past 5 years, however, organizations have layered the Kanban Method alongside Scrum to help them achieve different outcomes. In this presentation, we'll show how Scrumban can be used to:
* Accelerate the adoption of Scrum as an underlying software development framework (Using Kanban to improve the way we adopt Scrum as our chosen framework).
* Overcome many challenges teams and organizations commonly encounter as they attempt to scale it in larger organizations (Using Kanban to improve the way we master Scrum).
* Help organizations evolve new Scrum-like processes and practices that work for them -- not to accommodate inadequacies and dysfunctions Scrum exposes, but to resolve them in a manner that is most effective for their unique environment (Using Kanban as it's traditionally viewed).
Virginia Department of Corrections Kanban Journey
The overall culture in a corrections organization has traditionally been marked by command and control leadership and resistance to change, due to the high risk inherent in a prison environment. Hear how one such organization is using Kanban to embark upon incremental, evolutionary change as a way to facilitate continuous improvement while at the same time managing the risk and resistance of change.
In this session, you will learn how the journey began (what our ‘pull’ was); what resistance we encountered; how we kept the initiative moving forward despite resistance; and the role leadership played. Hear about the surprising benefits Kanban has brought about for the team, the leadership, the culture and the work being performed. See what we would have done differently had we known then what we know now.
Another aspect of the journey lies in the nature of public sector culture. Where is the motivation for improvement when ROI is not your primary driver? There are lessons to be learned here that apply to every organization, public and private.
Sprinkled throughout this session are reflections from a change agent’s experience.
Additionally, we will see how Kanban moved beyond the prison walls and into other state agencies as well as regional private sector.
Brought to you by Digité/ SwiftKanban
Digité/ SwiftKanban is thrilled to present a special session where Kanban practitioners and thought leaders will share field reports – customer experiences – with implementing Kanban. You are invited to join in the discussion in the familiar ‘Lean Coffee’ format but over lunch! You will be able to vote on topics that you would like to discuss. The topics will be discussed in the order of the number of votes they receive.
The panel includes –
Some of the suggested topics for the session are listed below based on the experience of our distinguished panel.
At the start of the session, you can vote on these topics as well as suggest others that attendees can vote on. Over lunch, we will tally up the votes and start the discussion right after lunch.
Seats are limited! We would like to have a cozy and meaningful, interactive and energetic session with about 50 attendees – so that each of us can carry back some useful and actionable lessons from it back to our respective organizations.
To book your spot, you must RSVP here or pick up your pass at the SwiftKanban booth. Capacity is strictly limited for this session!
We look forward to seeing you there!
This presentation will show how we learned to balance demand against capability to deliver software products faster, more predictability and with better quality -- this is the promise of Kanban. We will share actual work performance data to show the impacts of our change management. At Bazaarvoice, we transformed our conversations and culture with Kanban and we hope that by sharing this case study with our neighbors in the community, you will be provided with practical ideas on how you can apply Kanban effectively in your context to begin your own journey to a sustainable improvement culture.
Probabilistic Project Sizing with Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS)
In order to forecast the time and the budget needed to deliver a software product we need to be able to quantify “what” we are building since the resources required are related to “how much” software is built. That quantification is referred to as “sizing”. Software sizing is an activity in software engineering that is used to estimate the size of a software application or component. It forms the basis for estimating resource needs. Software sizing is different from delivery time estimation. Sizing estimates the probable size of a piece of software while delivery time estimation forecasts the time needed to build it. The relationship between the size of a piece of software and the time needed to deliver it is referred to as productivity.
The question many of us in software development try to answer is - how can we estimate the size of a project without prior identification and analysis of every single user story? The answer is needed for portfolio related decisions, quotations on prospect projects etc.
Analyzing all the stories in a project requires significant time and it can easily happen that great part of this effort will be pure waste. Priorities of initiatives and features change and some features could not be developed at all.
If you don't want to analyze all user stories in your project in order to estimate its size then Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS) is an approach you can use.
A central component of Kanban is to make invisible knowledge work visible. However, you will notice quite often that you very often cannot work, but are blocked. Waiting for the test environment, requirements unclear, or missing customer information are only a small part of blockages that prevent us from continuing to work. These blockages are in most cases not a singular event, but have a systemic cause. In other words, it is very unlikely that a blockage occurs only once in the history of a company. Normally the same blockage occurs again and again.
What can one do about it? Jumping out of the window in despair would be a possible approach. Another idea would be to see the blockages for what they are: Treasures of improvements. In this session, I will show how to harvest these treasures and to improve sustainably your working system. In addition, I will present a model that shows with the help of a few simple number games, which blockages need to be removed to achieve the greatest possible leverage.
This workshop aims to get to the bottom of some of the not really intuitive statements of Lean:
* Work is done faster if we do not work.
* Increasing the efficiency of teams results in a deterioration of overall performance.
* We have plenty of time for tasks for which we never have time.
* In a work system with no WIP limits through rolling a dice you get just as good forecasts as through intensive analyses and estimates.
* We do not bode well for our customers, if we process their tasks immediately.
* We can only be faster if we invest more time in quality.
* It does not matter how fast we work, at the end of the day we always create the same amount.
etc.
These statements are answered by the workshop participants themselves in an experiment. In addition, we will also look at the issues of (re)prioritization, change of requirements, specialists vs. generalists and bottlenecks. And most important of all: We will learn why the Spice Girls are the most important management thought leaders.
Very interactive workshop.
When will these “Work Items” be completed? How confident are you in that date? Working in the IT/IS domain, these questions are very familiar to you, right? If you’re learning about pull systems and principles of flow, and how to effectively apply them to your workflow, in my opinion, you’re taking a big step toward creating a (more) predictable system and being able to confidently answer these questions.
However, if your efforts to answer these questions are still relying greatly, for example, on any of the following:
1) Estimating levels of effort or duration needed to complete every work item.
2) An historical “average” only (ex. avg. lead time, avg. throughput, etc.).
3) Summing “best case estimates” and summing “worst case estimates” to produce a “range.”
4) Using any method similar to 1, 2, or 3 and adding a “buffer.”
Then, you’re missing out on what I’ve found to be one of the greatest benefits of an effective pull system, which is the ability to forecast using a probabilistic approach. More specifically I’m referring to simple, yet still powerful, ways to create meaningful forecasts of when work items will be completed.
In this workshop we’ll begin by contrasting probabilistic approaches with deterministic approaches. Then, we’ll cover some basic concepts that will be used to create a set of simple tools that provide powerful probabilistic forecasts for answering when an individual work item (ex. story) might be completed, or when a set of work items (ex. stories making up a feature, or a number of features making up a release) will be completed. The examples will be based on real world data and require nothing more than an MS-Excel spreadsheet. No formal previous statistics knowledge is required, however, as a “heads-up” we’ll introduce and discuss the following concepts: scatter plots, percentiles, histograms, random numbers, and conclude with a very gentle introduction to (Monte Carlo) simulations.
This workshop is neither a lecture nor a presentation of case studies unless attendees ask for it. If you join, you will have your say in the agenda and you will work with people in roles similar to yours on discussing challenges specific to IT Operations, Application Support and DevOps. We will look at these challenges through the lens of the Kanban Method and together, we will explore pragmatic solutions that fit your context and you can start using right away.
Some of the topics I will put up for vote and prioritization along with your topics will include:
I would love to see a crowd interested in exploring potential solutions to burning challenges. As long as you have interest in improving your IT Operations practices, you are welcomed to the workshop whether you have no experience with Kanban, are a versed practitioner, or anywhere in between. Some of the attendees are IT Ops professionals who work in Fortune 100 companies and deliver extraordinary results. One of them led his team to reduce time to market for deploying an operating system from 2 years to 3 months over a 3 year period. Another, inspired people in a change-resistant organization to do the unthinkable: adopt Kanban and stick with it for about 5 years now because it works well and fast. Freaky fast. And I know there is someone who wants to get started with the Kanban Method and doesn’t know where to begin. Everyone’s welcomed and finding answers begins with asking questions no matter how much you know. Show up, ask questions, learn, teach, laugh, remove a blind spot, connect new dots, repeat.
We won’t have time to address all questions just as we only have a limited amount of time at work and massive demand. We will prioritize topics, address the ones with most votes and I will organize a follow-up webinar if there is interest.
This workshop covers the ideas contained in Don Reinertsen’s bestselling book, “The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development.” It focuses on proven leverage points and specific practical methods that have helped participants achieve as much as a 90 percent reduction in cycle time.
It is fundamentally different from other workshops in its intense focus on quantification, economic justification, and the use of a science-based approach for applying lean.
Timings:
This workshop covers the ideas contained in Don Reinertsen’s bestselling book, “The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development.” It focuses on proven leverage points and specific practical methods that have helped participants achieve as much as a 90 percent reduction in cycle time.
It is fundamentally different from other workshops in its intense focus on quantification, economic justification, and the use of a science-based approach for applying lean.
Timings:
