Growing Kanban in Three Dimensions

Kanban systems can work at different scales and in widely different contexts. Indeed any organisation that delivers discrete packages of value ("work items") and which is interested in maximising the value and timeliness of its delivery, can analyse and improve its performance using the Kanban method. 

Kanban systems can grow - in fact in most cases it's much better that they grow than a massive process change is made suddenly across a whole organisation. "Big bangs" tend to be quite destructive, even if they could clear the way for something new. There are three dimensions in which Kanban systems grow:

• Width-wise growth: encompassing a wider scope of the lifecycle of work items than the typical "to do - doing - done" a single division of the process. It can cover from the idea to real value - or "concept to cash", though cash may come before or after the realisation of real value.
• Height-wise growth: by considering the hierarchy of items that make up valuable deliveries, each level of the hierarchy having differing flow characteristics. (This dimension use the "scale-free" nature of Kanban, the same principles and practices apply whatever the size of the work item.)
• Depth-wise growth: not only depth of understanding but depth of penetration through the full set of services required by the organisation to deliver value. (Sometimes referred to as "Scaling by not scaling" or "service-oriented Kanban", the approach here connects multiple services at the same level through feedback loops that balance the capacity of the various kanban systems.)

We'll look at each of these dimensions in upcoming articles. Which dimension to grow first will depend on context and the motivations for change. Any change needs to pay for itself with improvements in the flow of value, so asking "why?" is a more important first question than "what?".

When you come across a good idea ("agile" in general springs to mind at this point) it is very tempting to sweep away whatever you were doing before you were converted to the new idea, and start doing it everywhere. It should not come as a surprise to those who do this, that very soon a new idea will come along. With the poor results from mass conversion to the caricature of the original idea you adopted, the same cycle will be repeated. Instead grow the changes organically.

Try this: start small; understand the ideas as you assimilate them; grow what works and understand what doesn't work; work out why. Success will follow.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to +Pawel Brodzinski for the discussions on Portfolio Kanban... and one of the graphics on the top floor of the above diagram.

Scaling Kanban: Scale-Free or by "Not Scaling"

Nearly all agile processes started life as processes for single teams. Turns out this was very useful in getting software development processes that were appropriate to the domain (unlike single iteration waterfalls). It has brought a transformation in efficiency for small and - perhaps surprisingly - large projects alike. But
dealing with large projects always was the real problem. So the current interest in more formal definition of scaled agile processes is timely if not overdue.

I'm interested particularly in how Kanban scales. I think there are two separate threads to this:

1. Scale-free Kanban
2. Scaling Kanban by not scaling it

Scaling by not scaling is the idea - only touched upon in chapter 13 of +David Anderson's Blue Book - that multiple Kanban systems can be linked and balanced in an analogous manner to service-oriented architectures. The corporate operations review is the key feedback mechanism for the balancing process. Rather than expand on this idea here, it's maybe the topic for another post. Suffice to say it's the potentially "self-balancing" nature of such joined systems that make it such a powerful idea.

Scale-free Kanban on the other hand uses the fact that the definition of Kanban does not specifically reference the size of the items flowing, or the size of the context in which they are flowing. Hence Kanban can apply at different levels (see separate blog post "Could Kanban be defined in a "Scale-free" manner?"). At least three scales of Kanban are already in use:

1. Portfolio Kanban
2. Blue Book Kanban
3. Personal Kanban

The standard or "reference" scale corresponds to the method as described in the Blue Book. It concerns a small to medium size project (1-4 teams perhaps), with items flowing through each stage of the process between 0.5 and 5 days. (I'm not trying to be precise btw!)

Small scale would correspond to Benson and Barry's Personal Kanban. A single worker, pair or small team working on tasks that usually take a day or less.

Large scale concerns the flow of projects, releases or major features - it has been labelled Portfolio Kanban by some, including Pawel Brodzinski who has brought a new focus on this area.

At least at these 3 scales the principles and practices of Kanban can apply without modification. Some may  require less stress (for example the reference to levels of the organisation is not particularly relevant at the small scale), but all are applicable.

What is even more striking is that we already know how to link these different levels - several Kanban tools even use this property of Kanban to support boards at different scales out of the box. 

The flow-items are different at each scale. Portfolio flow-items may be projects, releases or major features (an interesting separate discussion: what do/should businesses track at the portfolio level?). We might refer to these items for example as "funded work packages". The business level Kanban board has a collection of these moving from the proposal stage, through approval and development to released. The (dynamic) decomposition of such items into minimum-marketable-features, epics, stories, etc. eventually leads to the items that will flow across the project/team level boards. At this level the items are often referred to as stories, features, defects or backlog items. Blockers at this level can reflect upwards, as can forecasting based on flow/throughput, and eventually completion. Precisely the same kind of levelling can apply, if desired, to take project flow items (stories say) down to personal tasks tracked on a personal Kanban board.

An important aspect to note here is that concurrent use of these three levels depends on the flow-items at one level decomposing into smaller flow-items at the next level down. This is why this hierarchical approach is an alternative to the balanced service-oriented model of the not-scaling approach, where the flow-items are "related peers" (for example a blocker in one system spawns a backlog item in another).

While it's good news that these scales can be unified in principle, practices may already be diverging across the 3 levels - for example it seems to be popular practice in Portfolio Boards to reverse the direction of flow so that items that will be delivered later are shown to the right of the board rather than on the left (see Pawel Brodzinski's example here). However I believe it is still worth preserving the commonality of method definition and to embrace Kanban's consistency over multiple scales moving forward..