Don’t Be Scared of Scaling!

Scaling a Kanban system can seem daunting, especially when you’re dealing with the complexities of a growing organization. The fear of disrupting services, overburdening teams, or getting tangled in dependencies can make the journey feel like navigating a haunted house of challenges. But there’s no need to be scared! With the right strategies—focused on managing dependencies, mastering triage, and evolving leadership—you can scale Kanban effectively and confidently. Let’s explore how to face these challenges head-on and create a sustainable, scalable Kanban system for your organization.

1. Start Where It’s Manageable: Inside-Out Kanban

The early guidance for implementing the Kanban Method was clear: start with customer-facing services. This advice remains valuable for many contexts, but as Kanban implementations have expanded to larger organizations, we’ve learned that a new approach often works better at scale—starting inside-out.

In large-scale Kanban implementations, focusing first on internal shared or platform services, rather than jumping straight into customer-facing services, allows you to manage complexity and politics more effectively. Internal services are typically smaller, more controllable, and less burdened with external expectations. This makes them ideal for applying the foundational Kanban principles and building early wins.

For example, improving lead times and flow efficiency in internal services not only builds momentum but also creates an environment where small, incremental improvements lead to big wins. These internal enhancements start to positively impact customer-facing services without requiring direct changes to them. This inside-out approach has proven successful in organizations like Best Day Travel Group, where improving internal services led to noticeable gains in customer-facing workflows, even though those areas weren’t the initial focus.

In traditional Lean methodologies, you might be told to start from the outside-in—focusing directly on the customer—but Kanban’s unique approach to scaling from the inside-out is a testament to its adaptability in modern service-oriented businesses. This method doesn’t just stop with internal success; it lays the groundwork for sustainable, customer-facing improvements in the long run.

2. Mastering Dependency Management at Scale

One of the biggest challenges in scaling Kanban within large organizations is managing dependencies. While smaller teams or isolated services can often sidestep major dependency issues, at scale, they become unavoidable. Rather than trying to eliminate dependencies (a near-impossible task in complex environments), the key is to manage them with skill and strategy. Here’s how you can effectively manage dependencies while scaling your Kanban system.

• Demand Shaping: Proactively shape the incoming work requests so that they align better with your team’s capacity and the workflow’s natural rhythms. This ensures smoother handling of dependencies without overwhelming your teams with work they cannot yet handle.
• Capacity Allocation: Allocating capacity intelligently is crucial for handling dependencies without creating bottlenecks. By setting aside specific capacity for different types of work, you can ensure that high-priority or critical tasks get the attention they need, while still keeping the flow of other work uninterrupted.
• Advanced Classes of Service: Not all work is created equal, and understanding how to categorize different work items can make a big difference. By using advanced classes of service, you can assign work into categories that help prioritize efforts based on urgency, customer need, and potential business impact. This not only improves flow but also ensures that dependencies are addressed in the most effective order.

Managing dependencies is not about eliminating them entirely; rather, it’s about skillfully navigating and mitigating their impact on your workflow. This is where Kanban’s adaptability shines—it’s a system that allows you to work with the constraints of dependencies while still maintaining flow and efficiency.

3. Triage Mastery: Prioritize with Precision

As your Kanban system scales, the complexity of prioritizing work increases significantly. This is where mastering triage comes into play. Triage is the ability to assess and categorize work items effectively, ensuring that they are handled in the right order, based on urgency, importance, and the value they bring to the organization.

Effective triage means that you aren’t simply reacting to the loudest voices or the most visible problems. Instead, you’re taking a strategic approach to evaluating work based on its risk, potential impact, and alignment with your organization’s goals.

• Risk Assessment Techniques: By incorporating risk assessment into your triage process, you can make informed decisions about which tasks need to be prioritized and which can be deferred. This approach ensures that critical issues are addressed first, while lower-risk tasks are handled at the right time.
• Efficient Handling: Building a robust triage capability allows your teams to align work items with organizational goals more effectively. This ensures that the most important and urgent work is addressed promptly, improving overall productivity and reducing the likelihood of missed deadlines or deliverables.

Mastering triage is crucial as you scale your Kanban system, because without proper prioritization, even the most well-designed workflows can become clogged with unimportant or misaligned tasks.

4. Empowering Teams for Autonomy: The Paradox of Scaling

One of the most rewarding aspects of scaling Kanban is seeing your teams grow more autonomous. As teams become self-sufficient in managing dependencies and mastering triage, they develop the ability to own their workflows and deliver more value with less oversight. This is the ultimate goal of scaling Kanban—empowering teams to work independently while still aligning with organizational objectives.

The paradox of this empowerment is that, as a leader, you essentially work yourself out of a job. As teams take on more responsibility for managing their own workflows, your role evolves from hands-on problem-solving to strategic oversight.

• Delegation and Trust-Building: Effective leadership in Kanban isn’t about micromanaging workflows—it’s about building trust and delegating responsibility. By empowering your teams to manage dependencies and triage on their own, you foster a sense of ownership and accountability that drives both individual and team performance.
• Evolving Roles: As your teams become more autonomous, your role as a leader shifts from day-to-day management to focusing on continuous improvement, coaching, and guiding the organization toward greater agility. This evolution of leadership allows you to work on higher-level strategic goals while your teams handle the operational details.

Empowering teams not only increases efficiency but also cultivates a culture of trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement, all of which are essential for scaling Kanban effectively.

5. Let Improvements Flow from the Inside Out

The “inside-out” approach to Kanban allows for improvements to flow naturally throughout your organization. By starting with internal services, managing dependencies, mastering triage, and empowering your teams, you create a ripple effect where enhancements to internal workflows positively impact customer-facing services without direct intervention. This method ensures a smoother, more sustainable scaling process that can handle the complexities of larger organizations while maintaining efficiency and flexibility.

This inside-out approach has been proven to work in organizations around the world. As improvements begin internally, they start to spill over into customer-facing areas, improving lead times, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance without the need for disruptive, large-scale changes all at once.

Conclusion: Take the Next Step in Scaling Your Kanban System

Scaling Kanban is not about eradicating challenges but rather about embracing continuous improvement and leveraging the right strategies to manage dependencies, master triage, and empower your teams. The key to successful scaling is starting where you can make quick wins, building trust, and allowing improvements to flow naturally from the inside out.

Ready to take your Kanban journey to the next level? Join our Enterprise Scale Kanban course and master the techniques of dependency management, triage, and leadership evolution that will elevate your Kanban implementation to new heights. This course is designed to provide actionable insights and strategies that will transform how you scale Kanban in your organization.