Successful Large-Scale Kanban Implementations

Many businesses strive for large-scale agility but find themselves facing failed attempts with various frameworks. Successful scale doesn’t come from installing a process framework!  Instead, it comes from building trust, avoiding mistakes and costly rework, improving quality, delegation, empowerment, and managing risk. How do we accomplish this? By increasing organizational maturity and thinking of your organization as a network of interdependent services.

 With a few simple rules or policies along with a few relatively simple techniques, such as classifying cost of delay qualitatively, we allow for autonomy. This means that the nodes in the network can operate independently with very little centralized control or overhead, enabling the enterprise to move quickly, exhibit agility, exploit opportunities, and show resilience. This enables an end-to-end service that is orchestrated and composed from existing services in the network, and new opportunities are exploited through improved cooperation and collaboration rather than expensive and painful reorganization and restructuring.

About the Course

Take your Kanban implementation from the department level up to a business unit consisting of multiple product units. This course will teach you how to create executive dashboard reporting for multiple business units allowing you to roll up results from a workforce of up to tens of thousands of people. Learn to view your enterprise as a network of interdependent services. Take service-oriented thinking from the Kanban Method and Kanban Management Professional training to the next level by learning the practices needed for effective dependency management.

Manage Dependencies With Confidence

Beyond a trivial scale of a single team, organizational design approaches to eliminate dependencies are ineffective. Attempts to design out dependencies tend to design in mediocrity. Dependencies in large-scale organizations and large-scale products or services, or products that aspire to be market leaders, are a fact of life. Instead of trying to eliminate dependencies, we need to learn to manage them elegantly and effectively. 

This course will teach you to effectively manage dependencies while minimizing the economic and productivity impacts by using concepts such as:

• Demand shaping
• Capacity allocation
• Advanced forms of classes of service
• Risk-assessment techniques
• Strong triage capability that separates work into three categories—do it now; leave it until later, but with a specific schedule; or choose not to do it at all

These techniques will contribute to highly predictable outcomes and superior economic results.

Increase Organizational Maturity

This class provides an overview of the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) and provides pragmatic, actionable, evidence-based guidance that is directly implementable. The class also acts as a bridge to the Kanban Maturity Model and a primer for those pursuing a coaching career path with the intent to become Kanban Coaching Professionals with a mastery of the KMM. 

Students will learn the basic principles of scaling any business activity. It provides actionable guidance focused on effective practices that enable better quality, demonstrate ways and means to ¨work yourself out of a job” and improve organizational maturity using the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM).

Introduction to Leadership Maturity

Build on Kanban Management Professional Knowledge

There are advanced practices not taught in KMP training that are required to enable large-scale implementation. The class includes revision of existing techniques such as enabling workers to self-organize around work, the Kanban lens, STATIK, commitment and triage, and lead time and risk hedging. It then applies these in the context of a large network of interdependent kanban systems. 

“What will you do differently next Monday?”

Due to the pragmatic and actionable nature of our guidance, we are able to ask at the end of every course, “What will you do differently next Monday?” Here are some possible takeaways:

• Be able to move quickly, exhibit agility, exploit opportunities, and show resilience
• Improve cooperation and collaboration rather than expensive and painful reorganization and restructuring
• Learn to manage your dependencies in a cost-effective manner with minimum impact on productivity
• Achieve an end-to-end workflow that increases speed and predictability
• Create highly predictable outcomes and superior economic results through proper risk management techniques
• Produce objectives and metrics to drive system-wide optimal behavior
• Be able to scale Kanban beyond a department to a whole business unit of up to tens of thousands of people
• Improve organizational maturity with pragmatic, actionable guidance based on the KMM

Who should take this class?

Kanban Management Professionals who want to take Kanban to the next level and understand not only the practices required to enable enterprise-scale kanban deployments, but also the leadership, culture, and organizational maturity required for effective large-scale implementation.

This course is aimed at practitioners and managers in operational positions who need and want to get things done at a large scale. Those who need to demonstrate enterprise-scale agility.

This course is focused on product portfolio material, so those who do not want to pursue a coaching role might find it the most practical next step if they wish to understand the elements needed for successful scaling. Those interested in this course might find the Kanban Leadership Professional courses to be the next step.

Kanban University® Certification

This course is certified by Kanban University. Active participants will receive a certificate of attendance upon completion.

Enterprise Kanban Management Professional Credential

After completing the Kanban Management Professional courses and the Enterprise Scale Kanban course, active participants will be awarded the Enterprise Kanban Management Professional credential by Kanban University.

An Enterprise Kanban Management Professional is proven to understand what is necessary to take an organization to maturity level 4. They understand how to implement a network of interconnected dependent kanban systems that might support an entire business unit of 300 to 1200 people.

Participants must complete Kanban Management Professional training prior to this course. This includes:

1. Kanban System Design

2. Kanban Systems Improvement or Kanban for Design and Innovation

Participants in the ESK course will work to meet and understand the following objectives:

Scaling Business Activities

·       Focus on quality 

o   How do you go about it? 

o   What are the benefits? 

o   Why is it important? 

·       How to "work yourself out of a job"

o   Understanding delegation, empowerment, facilitation, decision-making, decision frameworks, and use of policies 

o   Existing Kanban guidance put into context become powerful techniques that enable scale 

·       Improve organizational maturity using the KMM

o   Understanding the Kanban Maturity Model 

o   Why maturity level 4 should be the goal

Revision of KMP Techniques

·       Manage the work, let the workers self-organize around it 

· Service orientation (the Kanban Lens) and mapping workflow by service type 

·       STATIK (the Systems Thinking Approach to Implementing Kanban) 

·       Commitment and Triage 

·       Instrumenting and measuring lead time 

·       Trimming the tail of lead time distribution 

·       Thin-tailed lead time distribution and its relationship to Little´s Law 

·       Risk hedging and load balancing with capacity allocation across kanban systems 

·       Classes of service and cost of delay function shapes 

Enterprise Services Planning Techniques

·       Coping with irrefutable demand on shared services 

·       Classes of dependency management (based on cost of delay) 

·       Dynamic Reservation Systems 

·       Classes of Reservation