kanban experiences at volvo it - anders jonsson, ltg-4

Åsa Zetterlund, Petra Hallin, Anders JonssonVolvo IT

Kanban@Volvo IT


Program X

Global solution for all Volvo BA/BU’s

Program (Volvo IT part):

– Scaled from 25 to 50 persons and included a new site (Gothenburg, Wroclaw and Brazil)

– Multiple releases (several releases / year)

– Multiple functional patches (several / year)

– Multiple stakeholders

– Multiple projects (7) and Maintenance@once

– .NET technology


Background – why Kanban

Volvo IT must meet the challenge to increase the delivery capacity from Volvo IT regarding future and increased workload at Volvo XX, dept. XYZ and also resolve how to handle multiple releases from multiple stakeholders.

We needed something that could scale beyond our current way of working (Scrum)


Approach

We (Åsa Zetterlund, Petra Hallin and I) attended Kanban training given by David Anderson

Trained the entire team (~45-50 persons) onsite– Walkthrough of Kanban concepts

– Played the getKanban Board Game, www.getkanban.com

Created the and redefined the board

Spent a lot of time defining the process

– Policies

– Roles and feature teams

Meetings structure


Visual board (initial version)

Project ABC

Project YYY

Project XYZ

Analysis FDCG queue

Ready for IT WIP [xx]

In prog Done

Expediters

IT Dev Analysis WIP [xx]

Build Queue

Development WIP [xx]

In prog In progDone Done

Test WIP [xx]

Package & deploy

Live

Maintenance


Kanban board


Lessons learned

The team learned Kanban really fast

Knowledge sharing in the feature teams was good

– Distribution of knowledge

Work progressed, in general, in a good way in the feature teams

Maintenance and Kanban worked really well together from day one (blends perfectly)

Kanban gave us a very good overview of the work across projects etc (easier to maintain several teams this way)

Productivity goals was reached in large

Scrum and Kanban works really well together (you need to use the good parts in both tool kits)

Capacity planning became really easy and visible


Lessons learned cont.

Hard to get daily meetings to work properly

We focused a lot on the board content (dev process, policies etc) => didn’t have time or energy to improve our Kanban setup as soon as we would have liked

Don’t do Excel for 50 persons (it doesn’t scale though it’s a great tool)!

Traditional PM and Kanban doesn’t blend easily

You still need Scrum Masters (Kanban masters) and also a board owner when doing “program Kanban” (several projects etc)

You WILL NOT get it right the first time (this is a 100% guarantee) so GET GOING. But… it takes more time than anticipated to get the process in place and everyone to understand it so be prepared to spend some initial time and also to change it several times

Start with the existing process and make it visible


Kanban is like water”It goes around the rock and given time it molds the rock”

Quote:David Anderson, Vienna 6th of December 2011

kanban experiences at volvo it - anders jonsson, ltg-4

Technology