agile the kanban way - central ma pmi 2011

Copyright © 2011 Constant Contact Inc.

Agile The Kanban Way

PMI: Central MA Chapter

Gil IrizarryConstant Contact

2Copyright © 2011 Constant Contact, Inc.

Learning Objectives

• Learn what Kanban is

• Learn value stream mapping and how to apply it to your team

• Learn how to read a cumulative flow diagram


Agenda

• A bit about me and Constant Contact

• Theory –

• Motivations

• Background

• What is Kanban and how does it work

• Practice –

• Setting up a Kanban board

• Establishing policies and limits


My background

• Program Manager at Constant Contact

• Over 20 years software development and management experience, over 5 years in an agile software development environment

• CSM and PMP certifications, Kanban coaching training with David Anderson

• BS from Cornell, ALM from Harvard, certificate in Management from MIT Sloan

• [email protected], [email protected]

• http://www.slideshare.net/conoagil

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.slideshare.net/conoagil


Background on Constant Contact

• SaaS company offering on-line e-mail marketing, event marketing and surveys. Recent enhancements extend the services to the social media space

• >$200MM gross revenue per year

• >850 employees

• >475K paying customers

• Engineering and Operations total about 150 people

• First Scrum team formed in 2006


Motivations

• We want to move to Agile management methods. Why?

• React quicker to changing market conditions

• Get new features to users more quickly

• Frequent releases are smaller releases

• Better Quality


Quick Review of Scrum

• Fixed iterations

• Daily stand-ups

• What did you do yesterday, what did you do today, any impediments

• Retrospectives

• Burn-down chart

• Board with To Do, In Progress and Done states


Lean Principles

• Eliminate Waste

• Build Quality In

• Create Knowledge

• Defer Commitment

• Deliver Fast

• Respect People

• Optimize the WholeLeading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point by Mary and Tom Poppendieck


What is Kanban?

• A scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

• An effective tool to support the running of the production system as a whole.

• An excellent way for promoting improvements because reducing the number of work cards in circulation highlighted problem areas

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban


Foundational Principles of Kanban

• Start with what you do now

• Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change

• Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles

From: http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/the_principles_of_the_kanban_method (David Anderson)

http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/the_principles_of_the_kanban_method

http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/the_principles_of_the_kanban_method


5 Core Properties of Kanban

• Visualize the workflow

• Team board states are a reflection of the value stream

• Limit WIP

• Manage Flow

• Implied that flow should be continuous

• Make Process Policies Explicit

• Improve Collaboratively (using models & the scientific method)


Kanban and Roles

Lead Team

Org

• Prioritization• Definition• Ready-Ready

• Work mgmt.• Metrics• Improvement

• Delivery• Flow


You are one team!


Value Mapping Exercise

How do you make dinner?


Sample Value Stream

Drive to

market 30 min

Shop for

food 30 min

Drive home

30 min

Unpack groceries 5 min

Wash Pots 15 min

Cook Food

15 min

Serve Dinner 5 min

Eat!

50 min / 130 min = 38% efficiency

Value:

No Value:


Map the value stream in your group/dept./firm

• Work with your teams or teams on which you are dependent in order to drive more efficiency


Sample Kanban Board

States

Cla

sses o

f S

erv

ice

WIP Limits


Pull, not Push

• Work items should be pulled into available lanes

• Work should not be pushed when completed, even if its lane is full

Pull: Push:


Limit WIP

• Why?

• Less multitasking

• Less time lost to context switching

• Better quality

• Smoother flow


Classes of Service

• Different types of work need to be handled and prioritized differently

• We manage this through the concept of classes of service. Similar projects are grouped into classes and each class is assigned an allocation.

• For example, we may decide that 20% of ops time should be spent on infrastructure improvements, and 80% spent on servicing development


Sample CFD

11/9/2010 11/28/201012/17/2010 1/5/2011 1/24/2011 2/12/2011 3/3/2011 3/22/2011 4/10/2011 4/29/20110

10

20

30

40

50

60

User StoryMockupsReady-DoneIn DevelopmentDev DoneIn TestingComplete

Cycle Time

WIP

What happened here?

Lead Time

Potential Bottlenecks


Team Kanban

• Teams plan continuously. Backlogs should be constantly groomed.

• Teams test continuously

• It’s OK if a team finds a defect on the last day of the release. Pull the feature or delay the release, but keep the flow continuous

• It’s OK if a team starts work for the next release in the current release

• Aim for development and testing to flow more smoothly through your system


Metrics

• Considering gathering the following:

• Cycle time on items after grouping them by size:

• Completion time for small, medium and large

• Spread of cycle times

• Work items completed

• Open defects in production, to give a high-level approximation of technical debt


Metrics guide planning and estimation

• Over time, we would expect that the spread of cycle times for a given item size goes down.

• So, over time, an estimate of completion time for items of a given size should become more accurate.

• Work items can be sized by t-shirt sizes (smalls, mediums or larges) and the average cycle times for those sizes from the last release become the estimate for the upcoming release.

• Large items should in most cases be broken down into smaller items


2010 R7 2010 R8 2011 R1 2011 R2 2011 R3 2011 R40

5

10

15

20

25

30

35Average Cycle Times for work items

Average of Cycle Time (small - 1 Story Point)

Average of Cycle Time (medium - 3 Story Points)

Average of Cycle Time (large - 5 Story Points)


Kanban in practice

Copyright © 2011 Constant Contact, Inc. 27

Why Kanban?

• Shorter sprint lengths were forcing us to artificially break up items in order to fit within sprint boundaries.

• Sprint planning consumed the team for an entire day.

• Most of the work for a sprint was getting completed all at once, close to the end of the sprint.

• QA had nothing to do at the beginning of a sprint, but were overworked at the end.


Mapping the Value Stream

• At the time, the Website team was really 2 teams, Engineering and Design.

• We asked the teams to map out their current development process.

• It was really complicated…


Mapping the Value Stream


One Team – Single Flow

Produce

Todo Item and task

type by color

WIPL = 6 full items

Bugs & Footprints on board

Visible policies


Cumulative Flow Diagram

• QA overloaded

• Worked on more constant delivery

• Identified a bottleneck with source control

• Changed our branching strategy to improve

Before After


Cumulative Flow Diagram

• By September, we’re now releasing twice a week to Production

• Much smoother CFD, continuous deliver improves cycle time


One Year Later…

New classes of service


Resources

• Kanban by David J Anderson

• Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash - by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck

• Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development - by Corey Ladas

• http://www.netobjectives.com/

http://www.netobjectives.com/


Conclusion

Thank you!

agile the kanban way - central ma pmi 2011

Technology

constant contact saas

team kanban teams

kanban waypmi

kanban coaching training

core properties of kanban

firm work

work items

scrum team