Managing a business today means leveraging your existing capability to maximize throughput. Why am I focusing on throughput? If you think about your organizational value stream, you only make money (or realize revenue) when you deliver a product or a service to your customer. Having a large volume of work within your organizational pipe while not delivering anything means your investments are tied up with work-in-progress inventory. The more work-in-progress inventory you have the more investments are needed. How are you going to fund this investment? The faster your deliver, the faster you realize revenue. Hence, the focus on throughput.
Implement Kanban: Implement virtuous cycle of ongoing improvement
The hardest thing about implementing the Kanban is the paradigm shift in policies it leads to. “How can just visualizing work and limiting work improve throughput?” It’s so counter-intuitive. However, the very act of visualizing and limiting work highlights bottlenecks as they appear, giving you a chance to fix things before they become big issues. Implementing Kanban enterprise-wide, however, will need the blessing of senior management, specially if organization has been following traditional methods for a very long time. When going about leading the change, chances are that the people actual doing the work would absolutely love it since they get to see what’s within their queue. It is convincing the middle and the senior management that will be challenging. There’s also this perception of relinquishing control by the middle management. A paradigm shift indeed.
Kanban saves the day
I was brought in to deliver a project on-time with less than 2 months remaining. While the project scope and deliverables were clear, getting to the solution was not.
R&D was required to get some of the features delivered and that was expected to take up a significant amount of time. The team was cross functional and dispersed – from vendors to in-house application development folks to network and server infrastructure folks within Canada and the USA. There was no time for detailed planning. The deadline was non-negotiable and the project had to be delivered by the due date.
It appeared that delivering on time was a tall order and the team was wondering how in the world they would get it all done.
No such thing as multitasking
There is no such thing as multitasking. Humans are incapable at multitasking. We only task switch. And so do computers. The difference is that computers can task switch at a much faster rate to create an illusion of multitasking. I’ll use the term multitasking and task switching interchangeably for the reminder of this post.
Lean software development using Kanban
Unlock efficiency in software projects with Kanban, a Lean Agile tool that minimizes waste and maximizes delivery speed. Explore Kanban’s pull system and key principles to improve workflow and reduce project duration without sacrificing quality.