Category: Kanban Maturity Model

3 things successful project organizations never ignore

Many things changed in 2020 and I, logically, companies need to boost their growth by launching new products and services as soon as possible. However, I am concerned with what this means to you. I see your anxiety because of dedicating all your time to solving the issues that arise every day in your projects and still you do not deliver on time, your clients are dissatisfied with the delays and the quality, and your teams demand fewer changes of priorities. That is why you prepare for the Project Status Meeting the night before and you barely have time to think about the new products and markets that you could develop in order to diversify and strengthen your business.

You want to be able to see the status of your projects at a glance without reviewing numerous reports and doing additional calculations in Excel in order to assess the risks of delay or extra cost and decide how to address them. You want to know how the other projects that could affect yours are progressing. You need to save the time that both you and your teams dedicate to the bureaucracy to be able to use it for developing the projects and thus reduce delays and management expenses.

I know these situations and the frustration they generate in responsible people like you. They are common pains. My team and I have seen them in technology companies, banking, insurance, as well as industrial companies. Moreover, the organizations were using certain project management methods such as PMBOK, Scrum, or their own method. The project managers had received certified training and were applying the learned techniques. Despite all the effort, the challenges persisted.

Kanban practices, properly integrated with your management method, provide you with the data and feedback you need to manage your projects with agility and confidence.

On our website, you can find case studies of companies that have overcome this type of situation. Here I am going to summarize the three keys that successful companies never ignore when it comes to managing their projects and portfolio.

 

1. The Management leads the introduction of Kanban in the organization

Businesses achieve their objectives through their projects. Therefore, the Management wants to ensure the optimal functioning of the organization. However, and sometimes with good reason, they are concerned about changing the management practices. They carry lots of responsibility on their shoulders and prefer not to take additional risks of introducing new routines.

If this is your case, you have to know that Kanban is a management method that provides visibility at all levels and an understanding of what really happens in the company’s processes.

In addition, management policies precisely address the “gaps” that exist in the process definitions and facilitate the coordination of work between different teams and business areas. Without the involvement of managers, it is unlikely that effective company policies will be established. Managers interested in aligning the performance of the business areas take advantage of the potential of Kanban to overcome barriers and communication problems in their company without making drastic or structural changes.

Kanban makes visible the improvement opportunities in the current processes. Logically, this rises the need to define relevant actions. The leadership and involvement of the Management allow taking the right decisions and thus gaining benefits quickly.

Furthermore, if you seek to develop a culture of customer orientation, collaboration, respect, and focus on the flow of customer value, you have to know something else. – These are all values of the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM), and the Kanban practices that reinforce them naturally. Have a look at the KMM Overview poster to understand how the culture and business outcomes evolve with the organizational maturity.

If you want to see a real example of Management’s leadership and involvement in the improvement of a company project management, read the case study of ULMA Handling Systems.

 

2. See and manage end-to-end project workflow

Frequently companies decide to pilot new practices in one or a few teams and postpone visualizing and managing the end-to-end (E2E) project workflow. They typically do this because they are afraid of affecting entire projects, involving different teams or business units, or because they do not know how to visualize and manage work through several interrelated kanban systems. Consequently, they only have partial visibility and fail to gain the benefits at project level.

Therefore, if you are concerned with your projects, visualize and manage their workflow from request to final delivery. Make sure that you obtain quickly the information you need to progress in a coordinated manner. Your team members will help you because they also want to enjoy order at work, having clear priorities, and as little bureaucracy as possible.

Capture ML2 KPPM poster

This corresponds to maturity level 2, Customer-Driven organization in the Kanban Maturity Model. Connect the teams that are involved in your projects to take advantage of the shared visibility, the fluid coordination, and the fast feedback about the status of work. Have a look at our Kanban Project, Product and Portfolio Management poster, for ideas of how to implement it.

Companies like ULMA Handling Systems and Ekide have shared their experience with managing large and complex projects. The Finance area of BBVA Spain applied these practices, appropriately adapted, to the management of E2E finance processes and reported a significant reduction in their delivery times as well as overhead costs.

 

3. Evaluate the outcomes and adapt your management method adequately

At this point, you understand that Kanban, in particular the practices of making policies explicit and implementing feedback loops, brings clarity into your processes and decision-making frameworks, including your work prioritization criteria. This allows you to act quickly in unforeseen situations. An organization that is well-aligned and focused in their purpose, achieves better project results in a sustainable manner.

Moreover, developing a holistic understanding of how your organization works and “listening” to it (listen to the persons, the data, and voice of the customers) helps you to adapt your management method to the changing circumstances and to evolve the organizational culture.

Therefore, evaluate the benefits you gain using the following questions:

  • Is your internal project management more agile and effective?
    • Can you identify the status of work / project easily?
    • Are the times of waiting on other team/business unit shorter?
    • Have you reduced the time of blockage due to internal causes as well as the rework one?
    • Do you use homogenous work prioritization criteria?
    • Have you reduced the overhead time and cost?
    • Is your process consistent?
    • Is the workflow balanced?
    • Do you meet delivery deadlines? At least, have you reduced the delays?
  • How have the relationships between teams/business areas evolved?
    • Do you prioritize and plan projects together taking into account the customer expectations (project objectives), the strategic priorities and the actual capacity?
    • Do you use agreed criteria for starting and finishing work items?
    • Have you agreed policies for managing internal dependencies to ensure that the dependencies do not affect meeting project deadlines?
    • Does the Management make decisions about the portfolio and the company’s strategy taking into account the real capacity of the organization and the current project status?
  • Has the relationship with your customers improved?
    • Do you know the level of fulfillment of your client expectations based on data?
    • Do you know the reasons for your customer dissatisfaction?
    • Do you define actions to improve customer satisfaction through scientific experiments?
    • Are your clients involved in your planning and do they respect your capacity? (or are they still imposing end dates and insisting that you start working on their requests as soon as possible?)

Project management is still a difficult discipline. Responding quickly and appropriately to changes in customer expectations and project circumstances requires a change in the customs of the entire organization (not just of project managers or PMO members). Kanban and the Kanban Maturity Model help to introduce this change in an evolutionary way.

You can make it happen.

To establish a good foundation for the success of your initiative, try the following: that (1) The executive Management leads the change, (2) See and understand the end-to-end project workflow, and (3) Evaluate the outcomes and adapt your management method appropriately.

Read our case studies to learn from the experience of companies that use Kanban to manage their projects and portfolio.

 

Teodora Bozheva
Accredited Kanban Trainer & Consultant
Co-author of the Kanban Maturity Model
www.berriprocess.com

Related posts:

How to integrate PMBOK processes with Kanban practices for greater project success

Project management is challenging because it requires keeping an eye on and taking fast decisions about many aspects of your endeavor: time, costs, quality, resources, stakeholders, suppliers, etc. In today’s rapidly changing business environment running large and complex projects often becomes a hard job. Gartner highlights the importance of adopting an agile approach to project and portfolio management as well as the development of enterprise agility.  PMI reports that executive leaders emphasize the need to develop the skills of the project managers and the maturity of the entire organization.

It is a widely spread myth that the Kanban method is appropriate for managing services but not for projects. Our experience, however, has demonstrated the opposite.

In this post I explain what which Kanban practices, integrated with PMBOK processes have allowed our customers to cope with the common challenges in project management. They can help you too to resolve problems such as project delays, extra costs, conflicting or missing priorities, lack of alignment between project teams, stakeholders and suppliers, ineffective communication, etc.

Furthermore, using the Kanban Maturity Model will help you develop a culture of transparency, respect, focus on customer value and alignment around business purpose. Applying the systems thinking approach to managing work allows you to address complexity in a more informed and competent manner and effectively identify improvements.  Your entire organization grows in adaptability and resilienece.

In the table bellow you can find the Kanban practices that can be used together with other practices in the PMBOK knowledge areas to significantly improve the results of your projects.

Knowledge area Appropriate Kanban practices: Gains:
Project Integration Management
  • Visualize and manage processes and work by means of interconnected kanban systems
  • Collect and analyze workflow and process capability related data
  • Manage workflow
  • Simple consolidation and coordination during projects
  • Fast and up-to-date information about the status of project work
  • Effective project tracking, and reviewing
  • Clear priorities and alignment
  • Informed and quick decision making about resource allocation, prioritizing, managing stakeholder expectations and meeting requirements
  • Continuous and sustainable workflow; optimal utilization of organization’s capacity
Project Scope Management
  • Use real options thinking and an upstream kanban board to manage the process of collecting requirements, defining, and validating project scope and the changes to it
  • Confidence that requirements definitions are completed and communicated on time and meet the criteria for pulling them into the delivery kanban system for further development and implementation
Project Time Management
  • Use explicit policies for managing project work through the network of kanban systems
  • Visualize the workflow, i.e., the stages/activities of developing project work types
  • Use flow-related measures such as lead time per work type, process capability and work in process, including in queues
  • Identify impediments in the processes and recognize deviations and risks for on time delivery
  • Pragmatic planning of schedule management
  • Simpler, faster, and little effort- consuming monitoring and control of project activities
  • More realistic duration estimates
  • Higher project predictability
  • Faster delivery (reduced delays), lower overhead
  • Ability to take fast corrective and preventive actions to minimize the adverse impact of impediments on project success
Project Quality Management
  • Use explicit policies for managing rework as well as criteria for accepting and completing work
  • Analyze blockers and identify sources of delay; Do flow-related data and process capability analysis
  • Identify problematic policies
  • Define actions to improve the flow of work and the customer satisfaction
  • Consistent process quality
  • Higher process efficiency; reduction of the waste of type muri, mura, muda
  • Stronger skills in identifying improvements and conducting continuous process improvement activities in the organization
  • Higher quality of project results; Increased customer satisfaction
Project Resource Management
  • Use kanban boards and explicit policies for managing teamwork

 

 
  • Transparency, improved interactions, and more collaboration among team members; Higher trust
  • Greater individual’s skills and competences
  • Greater project team performance; higher team morale, motivation, and satisfaction with accomplishing project objectives
Project Communication Management
  • Use kanban boards to communicate the status of work, deliverables, team workload, impediments in the workflow as well as risks.
  • Use conclusions from data analysis
  • Conduct Kanban cadences (Implement feedback loops)
  • Simple way to an effective and streamlined communication
  • Sustainable rhythm of delivery
  • Alignment between the participating project teams, stakeholders, and suppliers
Project Risk Management
  • Get deeper understanding of the process capability and sources of delay
  • Get deeper understanding of customer demand (project requirements)
  • Use real data and facts about your projects, solutions, processes, customer, and other relevant factors to evaluate risk profiles
  • Ability to cut the materialization of the majority of the risks, i.e., the recurrent problems
  • Stronger abilities to define preventive actions and cope with uncertainty
  • Establishing a comprehensive, concrete, and meaningful framework for managing risks
  • Clear priorities
  • Proactive risk management
Project Procurement Management
  • Use a kanban board and practices to manage your procurement process
  • Consistent and efficient procurement process
Project Stakeholders Management
  • Use Kanban practices for visualizing and managing stakeholder’s engagements
  • Conduct regular Kanban meetings with the stakeholders
  • Straightforward communication
  • Fast feedback about issues related to stakeholder’s expectations

At Berriprocess Agility we are working actively to develop guidelines for Kanban Project and Portfolio Management. We use the evolutionary approach of the Kanban Maturity Model to enable the development of enterprise agility of project organizations. Download our poster here. Have a look at the steps you can take to upgrade your project management methodology.

Let me know your thoughts and experience.

Teodora Bozheva
Accredited Kanban Trainer & Consultant
Co-author of the Kanban Maturity Model
www.berriprocess.com

 

Related posts:

Upgrading your project management process step by step with KMM

Nowadays nobody doubts that adopting an agile approach to project management is the only way to survive and thrive. In the previous article “3 Kanban tactics for taking control over your projects and increase organizational agility in less than a year” we describe what Kanban practices you can integrate in your management routines to achieve greater organizational agility; namely, to make your organization work aligned around a purpose, respond rapidly and adequately to changes in your projects, resolve obstacles quickly, meet deadlines and customer requirements continually and in a sustainable manner.

The Kanban Project and Portfolio Management poster visualizes how your project and portfolio management practices develop together with the capabilities of your organization. The steps we describe follow the Kanban Maturity Model  – a guiding map for companies who seek a gradual approach to greater agility and resilience.

Let us see them in some more details.

ML1 Team Focused – Get visibility and coordination of teamwork

ML1 diagram
A ML1 organization is focused on developing the skills of the teams to work transparently and collaboratively on their assignments.

Visualize development flows

If the entire team is working on a given project, the team board visualizes the state of the modules (deliverables/ features) that are part of the project. In case that different specialist teams are involved in the project, e.g. industrial engineers, software developers, and mechanics, the Deliverable board visualizes the state of work conducted by a given specialist team, and a Project/ Product level board would be used to visualize the overall state of all project deliverables.

As maturity increases organizations start using a Multi-project board at which each ticket represents a project. In addition, the horizontal and vertical axes of the In Progress area are used to visualize how close a project is to delivery (horizontal axis) and to its due date (vertical axis).

Feedback loops

Teams at a ML1 organization typically make daily Kanban and periodic retrospective meetings. The Project/Product managers conduct project monitoring and planning meetings, usually weekly or bi-weekly. Team Leads or entire teams take part in them. On a regular basis the Project/Product Manager participates in a Multi-project monitoring (status) meeting.

Feedback loops ML1

Metrics

Flow-related metrics are not typically used at ML1.

Outcomes

The visibility in the teamwork, the agreed initial policies for doing the work, and the feedback obtained at regular short time intervals are all essential elements to improve team coordination and performance.

Nevertheless, from customers perspective, the product quality and its on-time delivery depend completely on the skills, motivation and the ability of the team to handle the issues and changes that appear in the course of the project development. Some teams would manage to fulfil their customer requirements, even if this requires extra effort and long working hours. However, many will suffer from unexpected problems, or dependencies on other teams or suppliers. Therefore, customers typically see a ML1 organization as unpredictable and unreliable. From inside, team members often complain from overburdening and inability to cope with changing priorities and meet project deadlines and budget requirements.

 

ML2 Customer-Driven – See end-to-end project workflow; Start cutting sources of delay

ML2 Diagram

At ML2 you connect teams, visualize and manage the end-to-end project workflow, define and handle appropriately different customer demand, and you take the first actions to reduce delays and budget overruns.

Visualize and manage  development flows

The In-Progress area on the team kanban board shows the stages of the process. This gives you instant information about the progress of each work item. In addition, teams start visualizing blockers, rework and work item aging. Thus, they resolve project issues quickly and hence reduce delays and extra costs.

Having visibility in the state of work and the impediments in the workflow at team, project and multi-project level provides you valuable feedback for planning and making decisions related to any issue that affects a single or several projects. Teams get better in coordinating their activities across projects and develop stronger understanding of the customer. Using a tool like Kanbanize, will give you this information in real time, that is the entire project team will be quickly aware of the actual situation of the project and will be able to propose appropriate actions.

Metrics

Flow-related data supplies useful information about the real capability of the system, the characteristics and the volume of the demand. You get a quantitative understanding of how much it really takes you to develop a deliverable of certain type (e.g. component, documentation, incident), or an entire project. This is the objective input you need to get better in estimating and scheduling.

You also become aware of the impact of blockages and dependencies on others on the completion of project deadlines and budget. This deeper understanding of your process motivates the introduction of basic policies for managing work across states, teams and business units. You also come to establishing common criteria for prioritizing work considering the customer needs and the capability of the system (compound of the people and machines that develop the project work).

Understanding the causes for the blockers and their impact on the project delivery time and budget is the first step to introducing effective risk management too. Your organization can already think of how to prevent at least the most frequently occurring sources of delays and budget overruns.

If you seriously aspire to see that your projects meet their schedule and budget constraints, your teams are capable to adequately respond to changes in customer requirements, and achieve this consistently, ML2 is your starting point.

Only in very large organizations or complex projects with long life cycle you might need to start from ML1. In any case, if your problem is long project delivery times, you have to know what impedes project progress while time keeps running, and you have to learn to manage these issues. If you lack visibility in the state of the project work, you should visualize all aspects of the work you carry on and make sure that thisinformation is available in real time. If your customers complain from delays, you have to know how much it really takes you to deliver a given type of work. Not how much time you estimate, but how much it really takes, including all the interruptions and time for rework, i.e. from the moment you start working on it until it is finally delivered to the customer.

Metrics ML2

Feedback loops

The focus on managing the end-to-end project workflow, the usage of flow-related metrics, and the better understanding of your customer demand and system (team/organization) capabilities define the topics for your meetings and reviews. As a result, you take control on your projects, improve the cross-team communication and coordination, and see that project delays and budget overruns get reduced.

Feedback loops ML2

You and your people can make it. You desire to deliver projects on time, see customers happy and feel that you keep under control everything you do as a team, as an organization. You are the people who best understand your work. You have the guidelines and tools for putting the right practices in place. And you all are going to be proud and happier working in an organization that values the understanding of your customers, maintaining steady and sustainable flow, obtaining fast data-and-facts feedback, react quickly and adequately to changes and learn systematically from your processes and experience. Take initiative. Make your project work flow.

 

ML3 Fit-for-purpose – Balance workflow across project/product lines

ML3 diagram
ML3 builds on what you have developed at ML2. At ML3 you get full control on your projects thanks to several key practices:

Visualize and manage development flows

  • You start using full kanban systems with agreed criteria for accepting and managing work items, and this helps creating a sustainable and predictable flow.
  • You use triage and class of service policies that allow you to shape demand, making sure that all customer expectations are met and you have acquired the desired flexibility to adapt to unexpected changes in the project context.
  • You visualize parent-child and pair-to-pair dependencies and use their understanding to make appropriate decisions at all levels. You can adjust the practices for managing internal dependencies and apply them  to managing your suppliers and reduce the uncertainty in subcontracting part of the project work.
  • You get a deeper understanding of your processes, their transaction and coordination cost, the cost of defects, cost of delay and flow efficiency. This allows you to start defining pragmatic actions to see improvement in economic results.

Metrics

  • Your workflow is stable and your flow-related data allow you to rely on your schedule and respond with confidence to customer questions about delivery time.
  • You introduce additional metrics that help you identify process improvements that will increase flow efficiency, product quality and economic results
  • You define and use KPIs to make sure you manage well your customer expectations
  • You use indicators of organizational health to ensure long-term sustainability of the adopted practices and cultural values

Feedback loops

  • The communication across the entire organization is seamless and fast. Teams and business units act in an aligned manner.
  • All feedback from the kanban boards, data analysis and system reviews is used for making informed decisions.

Feedback loops ML3

Outcomes

  • You get better at addressing risks and responding to uncertainty thanks to your deeper understanding of how your organization works as a system, your real capability, what your customers expect and how the market behaves.
  • Your purpose-driven culture is sustained by effective practices and tools and together they strengthen your business outcomes.
  • Your customers are happy because you adjust rapidly to changes in their requirements and deliver good product quality on time
  • Your people appreciate that “they can go home with no worries because the process is under control and they know where to continue from the next day” (words of a client of ours)

 

ML4 Risk-Hedged – Improve project portfolio economics

At ML4 you will visualize better dynamic capacity allocation to take more control on your project portfolio. You improve your risk identification, analysis and prevention skills. In addition, you will take advantage from your deep understanding of your critical processes to eliminate waste and improve process efficiency. Altogether, you will achieve greater economic results that will allow you to develop further your market leadership and ability to reinvent.

The vast majority of organizations are still at maturity level 1, some approaching ML2 or heading towards ML3. Therefore, and for the sake of article length, we are going to get deeper into ML4 in future articles.

 

Summary

Resuming, Kanban is your ally for getting your projects under control. It does not substitute your project management method. However, you can upgrade your project management routines with Kanban practices to address effectively the problems you face in daily basis.

Do not put your projects at risk trying to introduce drastic changes to your management practices at once. Follow the evolutionary approach of the Kanban Maturity Model to achieve improvements gradually, avoiding resistance to change.

Enterprise culture evolves together with the management skills and maturity. Read more about this aspect of organizational development in Kanban Maturity Model – Start Change With Heart.

 

Teodora Bozheva
Accredited Kanban Trainer & Consultant
Co-author of the Kanban Maturity Model
www.berriprocess.com

 

Related posts:

P.S. Follow us for more pragmatic guidance on developing agility of project organizations.

3 Kanban tactics for taking control over your projects and increase organizational agility in less than a year

“It is crucial for us to complete our project milestones. We cannot afford any delay.
We must have our projects under control.“

– PMO Director of a large company

This is what a PMO Director of a large industrial company told me recently in a conversation regarding their approach to project and portfolio management.

I myself used to manage software development projects and I have been consulting project companies for more than 15 years. Time passes but we keep seeing the following problems in the organizations:

  • Lack of visibility in project work status
  • Late identification of problems and risks and therefore, late reaction
  • Project delays and budget overruns
  • Lack of coordination between project teams
  • Frequently changing priorities and inability to respond to them
  • Wrong estimates, lack of predictability
  • Low product quality, lots of defects and rework
  • Customers requesting better products and services
  • Too much effort needed for obtaining project status information, re-planning, etc.

I am pretty sure you recognize at least some of these challenges and you seek a way to resolve the daily project issues rapidly, so that you can dedicate more time to developing your business. Furthermore, you wish to make space in your daily routine for doing sport, spending time with your family, and have enough sleep… Understandable desires!

Visualize your project team(s) working in a well-coordinated manner. Visualize your organization working in harmony. Visualize your customers happy after receiving the right information about the status of their project and eventually obtaining the requested product or service on time. Visualize yourself focused on how to grow the business and also having enough energy for your leisure time.

Integrating Kanban practices in your project management methodology can take you to what you aspire. This does not mean that you have to make a radical change in your project management.

Managing projects and portfolio with Kanban is not about substituting your project management method with a new one. It is about complementing it with Kanban practices that help you cope with the most painful management problems.

A number of companies have used Kanban to obtain visibility in the real status of their projects, establish clear priorities, align business units, speed up delivery of customer value, achieve smooth and predictable workflow, and develop a culture of transparency, collaboration and focus on business purpose. You can find the case studies of some of these companies on our web site. Making the right steps they saw improvements in less than a year.

 

3 Kanban tactics for taking control over your projects

The Kanban Project and Portfolio Management poster resumes the three essential routines that will take you and your organization to your aim:

  • Visualize and manage development flows
  • Feedback loops – Introduce the right feedback in your project and portfolio meetings
  • Metrics – Use the right metrics and process understanding for managing the project flow

Using kanban boards to visualize the development flows at every level at which you take decisions brings awareness of the actual status of the project work. Signaling priorities, blockers, rework, capacity and real workload of your teams (system) alert you about risks of delay, overburdening or unsatisfiable product quality. You need this feedback on-time to be able to resolve issues quickly and effectively correct the course of your project towards its deadline.

However, visualization only will not resolve all the challenges in your project management. Although visual boards show important aspects of your work, you will also need data to manage project progress and achieve predictable and balanced flow of results.

The flow-related metrics and data will help you answer questions such as how long does it take us to develop a work item of type A (e.g. a plan, a component, a feature)? What is the impact of a given blocking issue on the project delivery time and budget? With the current capability and workload when do we expect to start and deliver a certain project?

For sure, your project management process includes periodic work reviewing and planning meetings. The Kanban cadences incorporate the systems thinking approach to managing work across the entire organization and seeing work in progress as inventory, even if it is invisible knowledge work. They are focused on providing frequent feedback about unforeseen events, changes to project requirements and/or priorities, system capability, and impact of internal and external dependencies. Integrating them with your current project meetings allows you to make coherent decisions and re-align the team(s) and the organization around project objectives and/or strategic goals.

Overall, ingraining these 3 Kanban tactics in your project management routines strengthen the abilities of your organization to work aligned around a purpose, respond rapidly and adequately to changes in your projects, resolve obstacles quickly, meet deadlines and customer requirements continually. Briefly, they develop your organizational agility.

 

An evolutionary approach to upgrading your way of project management

As said before, you do not impose new habits all of a sudden. Evolving from where you are to where you aspire to be is a journey. A number of organizations have experienced it and we know the potential barriers on it as well as how to overcome them.

Evolutionary approach diagram

The Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) provides guidance that help you avoid drawbacks and ensure a smooth and inspirational progress of your transformation.

The KMM defines 7 levels of organizational maturity. With respect to project management, maturity level 0 refers to cases when an individual manages their own project work. Organizations typically start from introducing practices for managing team work (maturity level 1, ML1). Then, continue with coordinating one or more teams in an end-to-end project workflow (ML2). ML3 is about aligning several project/product and service lines and balancing the workflows across them in order to continually meet customer expectations in a sustainable manner. ML4 organizations develop strong skills in risk hedging, flow efficiency optimization, dynamic capacity allocation and portfolio management. Therefore, they achieve improved economic results while keeping high level of customer and stakeholder satisfaction. ML5&6 are about building culture and skills for market leadership, congruence, and reinvention.

At each level appropriate Kanban practices are combined with relevant cultural values to ensure that the achieved improvements in the management abilities, organizational culture and business outcomes last long.

Download the Kanban Project and Portfolio poster. It visualizes how your project and portfolio management practices develop together with the evolution of your organization.

Read Upgrading your project management method step by step with the KMM for more details and insights.

Follow us to learn more about developing agility of project organizations.

Related posts:

Teodora Bozheva
Accredited Kanban Trainer & Consultant
Co-author of the Kanban Maturity Model
www.berriprocess.com

Organizational Maturity Levels (KMM) – Maturity Level 0 and 1

I am sure you have heard of the Kanban Maturity Model, also known as KMM, but if you do not already know it, do not worry. We will prepare a series of related posts where we will explain one at a time each of the maturity levels by which companies scale to become an organization “Fit-for-purpose”.

The KMM has created thanks to the experience of more than 10 years of its creators, Teodora Bozheva and David J. Anderson working in different organizations in various sectors and countries. It brings together the most relevant practices by which organizations can be guided to achieve improvements, meet customer expectations, avoid and solve challenges such as resistance to change, set too ambitious goals or not know how to continue advancing on their path to agility.

It consists of 7 levels of maturity in total, the first of which is level 0 known as “oblivious” in which the people of the organization are focused solely on their personal tasks, there is no team vision. It is also appreciated at this level that there are always people with very specific knowledge who do not usually share with others what they know since they are focused on their work coming out. They don’t know they have to understand the process. But we are not going to focus on explaining this level 0 since we are interested in moving beyond this level.

ML0: my way

We move to level 1 from where in most organizations begins, known as “team focused”. According to the KPMG’s latest annual report “Agile Transformation From Agile experiments to operating model transformation”  2019, we can highlight that 74% of respondents apply Agile in their organization at the team level; seeing very far to apply it at the organization-wide level.

At level 1 we are already talking about team tasks, although it is true that there is still no culture of full collaboration. A team kanban board is already used at this level where each person’s tasks are visualized so that it exists and the principle of transparency and that it facilitates collaboration. At this level, there is almost always someone who “pulls the cart” such as a Team Leader or responsible.

As a general rule, the main objective of this level will be to create a common understanding that it is not to start work, since if we start without finishing the system collapses, that is why we start using avatars that point out the work of each person, you can use  WIP limits (Work  In  Progress) both per person and per team, start visualizing initial policies so that all team members know how to act on any unforeseen or change of priorities, and some metrics are being used that, for the moment, will only measure people and their jobs (workflow management metrics, locks, when a job starts, when it ends …).

As for the meetings that are usually held at this level is the Kanban Meeting, daily, informal and “stand up meeting” in which to talk about the problems that exist to continue with something that same morning, or some change of priority by the entry of an emergency; and on the other hand the Team-level Replenishment Meeting where you talk about tasks that can enter the board once a week and which have problems; it’s about reviewing and re-feeding the board so that the team has the job well defined.

At this level, it also usually happens that you start thinking about customer expectations, something interesting. For last, it is essential that Middle/Senior Level Management is involved to continue the path to agility and thus continue with best practices to move to level 2 known as “customer-driven”.

ML1 unconnected teams

Do you want to continue to know the maturity levels?

In another post, we will explain the next level 2 of maturity “customer-driven”. Follow us on social networks so you do not miss the new posts.

 

Isabel Villanueva Izquierdo
Accredited Kanban Coach
www.berriprocess.com

 

What Executive Managers Need to Know About the Kanban Maturity Model and Developing Business Agility

Executive management decisions and leadership determine a company’s purpose, behaviors, relationships, work practices and ability to adapt to changes in their business environment quickly with endurable economic impact. Developing a resilient and robust business with fast changes always happening in the market, technological, and social environment is a challenging goal. Therefore, the usual questions C-level Managers ask are related to what developing business agility implies for senior-level managers and how to define the right approach to it.

Three years ago, David Anderson and I launched the Kanban Maturity Model. Since then we have been teaching and helping a number of Kanban coaches to understand it and to apply it in real business situations. The first case studies are already published on our website. I myself have been using it actively in different business sectors such as finance, insurance and the engineering industry.

The observations and experience that we collected this whole time help us to give pragmatic, actionable guidance to executive managers who want to develop their business agility and are committed to lead these journeys.

What is business agility and what does it imply?

Business agility is a hot topic, and I have talked about it with quite a few senior-level managers and business owners. They all share the need to shorten the time to market, the ability to adapt faster to changes in customer expectations or market context, to increase efficiency, and to reduce costs. However, they have a different understanding of what it implies to develop these abilities.

I would categorize their viewpoints in the following manner:

  • Not for us. Managers are agile. Teams have to become Agile too. – These are the managers who believe that all they need is Agile teams and little or no change in middle or senior level management. They think that Agile teams are constructed precisely to cope with changing priorities. Transparent and collaborative forms of work are difficult to accept for this group of bosses. Trey find restrictions and control more powerful than building trust and empowerment.
  • We did it without effect. Agile implementation does not bring benefits to the business. – These are managers of companies that have implemented Agile practices at team level and conduct all ceremonies regularly. However, management culture stays the same. No social change has occurred in the organization. Therefore, these organizations see little or no improvement at business level. They feel stuck, unhappy with the situation but not doing anything about it either.
    The subtle difference from the first and second group is that those who say “this is not for us” do not even think that change at management level might be necessary, while those who think “we did it without effect” consider that they took actions to improve business agility but the Agile methods were not effective.
  • We all have to change. Appropriate change of culture and management practices are needed for business agility. – This is the group of business owners and executive managers who understand that growing business agility requires an integral change of culture and management practices at all organizational levels. This change is part of their business strategy.

The CEO of one company told me the following in my first meeting with them:

“To stay competitive, we need to change the way we manage our projects. This requires change in our culture.
This is the change that I boost from my position. Therefore, we want to start with Kanban”.

Until recently, following the inertia might have been possible in relatively stable businesses. However, for the last couple of months the coronavirus crisis changed the business context significantly. Continuing the old way of thinking and behaving is not an option anymore if the business is to survive and thrive in the new situation.

KMM and Business Agility

Business agility requires developing the capabilities that allow the organization to obtain rapid feedback (from customers, the market, technology state of the art, business and sociological context), define goals and move quickly towards them. This implies strong executive management commitment and appropriate actions that unite, align and focus development activities on the new customer expectations and business purpose.

“The Kanban Maturity Model describes practices which develop culture for business agility.
Senior-level leadership is essential to spark the evolution and achieve success.”

The Kanban Maturity Model is based on four pillars which interact strongly:

  • Cultural values – Establish the basis for introducing practices.
  • Kanban practices – Strengthen values and ensure business outcomes
  • Business outcomes – Demonstrate the outcome of practices and culture.
  • Managed evolution – Guidelines on how to stress an organization just enough to make it reflect, evolve and become fitter in their business context.
Three pillars

Evolving Through the Organizational Maturity Levels and Executive Management’s Role in It

Our experience with the KMM and with guiding successful evolutionary organizational change shows a pattern of actions and effects. Namely, the following one:

  1. Start with cultural values – Trigger conversations about new values and desired behaviours that would bring desired benefits to the organization and its people. Make other managers and staff reflect on what practices are necessary to achieve the benefits.
  2. Introduce appropriate Kanban practices – Select appropriate practices from the maturity level to which the values belong; these practices are proven to prevent resistance, strengthen the values and develop the organizational capabilities for business agility.
    Introduce the selected practices by means of scientific experiments.
  3. Turn practices into habits and continue to step 1.

So, how does one start and what should they focus their actions on?

Every organizational context is different. At the same time, when talking about evolving organizational culture and work practices, challenges are quite similar.

Three years of active validation and further development of the KMM have shown us what cultural values and key Kanban practices develop the organizational skills we observe at each organizational maturity level. You can find the descriptions of the full list of Kanban practices in the upcoming book.

ML0

If you have employees specialized in particular tasks and working alone on them, make them focus on the assignments. Help them organize their work as to feel proud of their achievement. Let them see themselves as service providers and take accountability for it.

ML1
  • Focus on making individuals start working collaboratively. Help them see that a team achieves better results than a group of individuals.
  • Build their confidence in organizing their work using explicit policies.Everyone has to respect the established policies, including the managers. Substitute the policy “Boss’ requests first” by objective work-related criteria.
  • Make them feel proud of what they achieve as a team. Let them take initiative to improve what they see appropriate in order to improve internal organization and delivered results.
ML2

This is the point at which middle and senior-level leadership becomes essential.

  • Connect teams and enable their cooperation in an end-to-end workflow which develops and delivers a service to a customer.
  • Build the understanding that the team’s job is to deliver a service to a customer or to the wider workflow through which customer value is created.
  • Facilitate the definition of explicit policies which manage dependencies between teams and facilitate decision making for a faster flow of results.
  • Shift the management focus from ensuring that people are busy to assuring flow, i.e. progression of work towards delivery to the customer.
  • Involve the teams in developing the shared understanding of the end-to-end process and what impedes flow. Work with them on identifying, experimenting, and implementing appropriate ideas that improve service/product delivery time and quality as well as issue resolution time and effort.
Ml3

Creating a fit-for-purpose organization goes beyond creating a team or a group of teams delivering a service or product. It is about the entire organization.

At this level executive management role and leadership starts with defining a purpose and working on uniting and aligning the entire organization around this shared purpose. Effectively, this means the following:

  • Complement the focus on the customer with the understanding of customer needs and manage services as to ensure that they meet their customers’ expectations
  • Encourage and enable that services are managed based on deeper quantitative understanding of flow, demand, and capability, and that decisions for selecting and starting a work item take into consideration available capacity.
  • Develop leadership at all organizational levels so that all business units cooperate effectively. Moreover, in critical situations, the managers are able to agree and execute decisions which allow the business to recover rapidly, adapt quickly and thrive.
  • Build up the culture of continuous improvement which includes improving sustainability, processes, professional development of individuals, relationships within the organization and with customers.
ML4
  • Educate decision making based on data and statistics, experiment evidences and causal analysis
  • Focus actions on maintaining all business aspects in balance: employee satisfaction, fulfilling customer expectations, shareholders’ objectives and regulatory authorities
  • Strengthen joint work of employees at different organizational levels to increase trust
  • Develop leadership skills to increase unity and alignment while building a culture of competitiveness and fairness.

At maturity level 5 and 6 organizations are focused on optimizing for market leadership, anticipating the future, reinventing the business and ensuring  long-term survival.

The majority of the organizations are still at maturity level 1 and 2. Therefore, our principal goal is to help them evolve and build the culture that helps them achieve better business outcomes. Thus, in this article I will not go deeper in the description for ML5&6.

You will find more details in the upcoming book.

 

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Let me know if you have any questions.

 

Teodora Bozheva
Co-author of the Kanban Maturity Model
www.berriprocess.com