Kanban

New Kanban training course! Learn how to optimize the flow of delivering business value to your customers!

Why Kanban?

The top four reasons teams are using Kanban in their Agile projects:

• Increase the delivery of value to their customers
• Improve throughput of the team
• Enhance quality of the product
• Accelerate time-to-market

Join the many teams that have realized these and many other benefits through adopting Kanban methods.

Active Learning

This Kanban course is a stimulating combination of class interaction, active learning exercises, and group collaboration. Each is designed to allow you to learn through practice so you can readily apply what you have learned in your own workplace right away.

This course is valuable for anyone who is looking to optimize the flow of business and add value to any organization, including the following:

• Project Managers
• Developers
• Testers
• IT Managers/Directors
• Architects
• Executives
• Team leaders
• Software managers

This Kanban training course is a stimulating combination of class interaction, case studies, group exercises and workshops. Each is designed to allow you to easily grasp Kanban concepts and techniques. Specifically, you will cover:

• History and principles of Lean and how it is applied to software development
• The origins of Kanban and why 'pull' systems are more efficient than 'push' systems
• Create Value Stream Maps to identify and eliminate source of waste in your development ecosystem
• Implement Kanban to optimize the flow of work on your team
• Use Kanban to manage the work queue at the Program and Portfolio levels of an Enterprise
• Understand work in process (WIP) to limit work to capacity in order to improve team and organizational efficiency
• Measure lead time and cycle time to improve planning and forecasting
• Visualize workflow with continuous flow diagrams
• Understand when and when not to use Kanban
• Combine Kanban with Scrum to maximize efficiency
• Decompose requirements into minimum marketable features to improve speed to market
• Play a Kanban simulation game to reinforce concepts learned

Section I: History and Principles of Lean

Lean is a flavor of agile that focuses on optimizing the throughput of an end-to-end process by rooting out and eliminating sources of waste. Lean has its roots in manufacturing but has been adapted to the software development lifecycle as a powerful means to increase team velocity and efficiency. In the section, we'll discuss the following:

• The Origins of Lean
• Core Beliefs of Lean
• What Is Lean Software Development
• Principles of Lean Software Development
• The Seven forms of Waste
• How does Lean work with other flavors of Agile

Class Exercise

Working individually, think about the Seven Forms of Waste identified in Lean Software Development and identify what forms of waste exist in your current organization.

Section II. Understanding Kanban

Kanban comes from the Lean manufacturing world and when applied to software development dramatically improves an agile team's awareness of inefficiencies so they can maximize productivity and business value delivery flow. In this section we explore:

• Origins of Kanban
• Understanding Flow
• Learning the difference between 'push' and 'pull' systems
• Reviewing practical examples of Kanban in action

Class Exercise Using the principles of Kanban, attendees will play the Kanban Pizza Game that not only teaches the concepts of flow but how to transform an existing process to a Kanban system.

Section III: Kanban Measurements

The benefits realized by Kanban are based on proven concepts used in the manufacturing sector. These concepts measure the throughput of work through a system, whether it is an assembly line or a software team. In this section we cover:

• Understanding and monitoring Work in Process (WIP)
• Measuring Lead Time and Cycle Time
• Creating Continuous Flow Diagrams

Section IV: Program and Portfolio Management using Kanban

One of the key challenges of agile is scaling it from a few teams to the enterprise level. This involves orchestrating the work across multiple teams working on multiple projects within a program or multiple programs within an organization's portfolio of products or services. Kanban is an ideal tool to manage the flow of work at the Program and Portfolio levels so that it can be effectively disseminated across multiple teams. In this section we will explore:

• Managing the queue of work at the Program and Portfolio level
• Understanding how to integrate Scrum at the Team level and Kanban at the Enterprise level

Section V: Combining Kanban with Scrum

Kanban can be used effectively on its own but can also be applied with Scrum to realize the benefits of both agile approaches. In this section we will explore:

• Comparing Kanban to Scrum
• Understanding the what Scrumban is
• Learning how to apply Scrumban and when to use Scrum and Kanban separately

Section VI: Value Stream Maps

A key concept of Lean is to optimize the whole by looking at the entirety of an end-to-end process to identify opportunities for streamlining. Value Stream Mapping is an invaluable technique to define the current state of a process and analyze it for opportunities to reduce time spent on non-value steps. In this section we will explore:

• Learning to define the 'as is' state of a process
• Understanding how to identify steps in the process that provide value to the customer and those that do not
• Learning how to calculate the efficiency of a process from end-to-end
• Appling steps to create a future state process that reduces total cycle time

Class Exercise

In teams, apply the method of value stream mapping to an inefficient process within your organization. Learn to diagram the 'as is' process to identify areas of waste and then develop the 'to be' process that reduces total cycle time.

Section VII: Minimum Marketable Features

One of the main benefits of agile is to deliver value more rapidly and frequently to your customer. The concept of Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) provides an essential tool to effectively decompose customer needs into finer grain features that can be delivered more rapidly than waiting for large scale features to be complete. In this section we will explore:

• Understanding what is a Minimum Marketable Feature
• Learning how it increases flow of value to your business
• Decomposing coarse grain requirements into MMFs

Class Exercise

In teams, review a product backlog consisting of coarse grain Epics for a release. Using the concepts of MMF, decompose the Epics into smaller sets of stories that provide value to users in shorter development cycles.

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