Lessons learned from coaching 50+ kanban teams

Johan Nordin and I plan to attend the Lean Kanban Central Europe (LKCE) conference this year again. Due to a busy fall it will unfortunatly be our only chance to meet everyone from the community. Here is the abstract of the paper that we have submited to LKCE13, entitled "Lessons learned from coaching 50+ kanban teams":

In this experience report, we present the lessons we have learned during a three years-long journey coaching more than 50 teams in using the Kanban method at Sandvik IT. We share our experience gathered when introducing, supporting and scaling Kanban systems with the purpose to improve the organization as a whole.

Based on validated experiments and facts, we present:

• How we use the Kanban method to create a culture of continuous improvements.
• How we introduce Kanban to overburdened teams using a one-day kick-start workshop, and how this workshop evolved into what is described in the “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide”.
• How we help teams to improve their kanban system using a depth-of-kanban coaching tool.
• How we discovered the key role that management plays in maintaining the will to improve continuously, and our experiments on how to nurture it.
• How we keep track of the improvement capability of the various teams and how we act on it.
• How we scale our coaching capability to help even more teams.

This talk is a direct continuation of our LKCE11 talk “Igniting Change in 20 teams within 6 months”, rated as ‘One of the best Kanban case studies out there’ by Brickell Key Award winner Yuval Yeret.

The title of the talk has triggered an interesting reaction for David Anderson. Here is the twitter exchange:

@leankanbance @ChrisAch I'd still like to understand what a #kanban team is? Terms like that make me think people don't get it at all!

— David J Anderson (@djaa_dja) June 19, 2013

@djaa_dja But what we are really after are end-2-end value streams. Our experience report tells the story of how we swap to stream-focus.

— Chris Achouiantz (@ChrisAch) June 19, 2013

@ChrisAch okay. So it's a form of #protokanban . Maybe the 3rd form I need to document? Good. Thanks

— David J Anderson (@djaa_dja) June 19, 2013

I will find the time to blogg more about teams and Kanban in a short while to better explain my position.

Thanks for reading!