Now You See It! Observing Flow Using Kanban Boards

“I didn’t know you could do that with Kanban!” This interactive workshop reveals how Kanban systems can help solve the governance and coordination problems that threaten large-scale initiatives. Too many strategic priorities chasing too few resources. Dependencies between teams. Delays due to lack of clear delineations of ownership and responsibility, and a crisp definition of ready. We will explore innovative new Kanban designs that can significantly simplify these difficult problems, ultimately resulting in better outcomes with less stress. We will start by reviewing Kanban board designs from diverse industries and at multiple levels of the organization. We will then interactively construct several interesting examples, including Kanban boards for managing multiple streams of work, facilitating multi-team coordination at scale, and even planning and communicating corporate strategy. Powerful concepts like demand shaping, classes of service, capacity tokens, and order points will effortlessly reveal themselves. Best of all: these Kanban systems are perfectly compatible with Scrum Scaling frameworks such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In fact, one might call them the secret ingredient! Using nothing but painter’s tape and sticky notes of all shapes, sizes and colors, we will gain an appreciation of how thoughtfully designed boards (and the coordination systems they enable) can help unlock true business agility.