Is that “start with what you do now”-principle from kanban still ‘true’?

One of the pillars of the Kanban method is the principle “Start with what you do now.”

Looking at it historically, this was especially related to the fact that there is no need for any additional roles, meetings, or titles when introducing the Kanban method. In the early days that was such a stark contrast to other process improvement approaches that you still can find the foundational principle “Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities & job titles” on some Kanban method websites. Today this message has become part of the “Start with what you do now”-principle (as the second bullet point).

Over the years the body of knowledge in the realm of Kanban has grown and with some of the “newer” ideas there are a number of aspects that seem to contradict this very notion.

One of the more prominent ideas in this respect is the whole landscape of “Discovery Kanban”, “Customer Kanban”, and “Upstream Kanban.” Basically this is the idea to not only manage the delivery of work through a Kanban system, but also manage and organize the discovery of options with a Kanban system. Conceptually this has been described by Patrick Steyaert and it has been incorporated in the Kanban method as can be found e.g. in the related book Essential Upstream Kanban.

Yet, many companies don’t actually have a managed options discovery process – so where does this leave us with regards to the "start with what you do now"-principle? One possible starting point is David Anderson’s example for combining discovery and delivery kanban. This is a little different from the approach Patrick is describing, and most probably not exactly how the items “on the left“ of your delivery Kanban system flow now. (That is of course regardless of whether you call them “ideas“, “options”, “feature requests”, “demands”, or anything else.) But in my experience it is a very feasible way to get to “(finding out and) starting with what you do now.” As in so many cases, even though there might not be any formal discovery process, once you start looking into the details of the existing items and their history you might find that there is an informal process to be uncovered. It might more or less conform to the concepts lined out in the system descibed by David J Anderson, or not. Even if it doesn’t, just by having a board conforming to those concepts, trying to fit the (existing or assumed) items on it and facilitating the discussions around it, there is a good chance that you either uncover the real process or already evolve the process to something a little bit more fit for purpose.

Still, you actually started with what you did then – no new roles, no new processes. Not initially at least. Probably some processes evolved from having the discussions about the relative position of items on the board and how to get them there. And that is already the Kanban method at work as a change-management approach.

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

P.S.: Thanks to Tim for bringing up this issue about “start with what you do now.” Nice catch.

What happens left of the Scrum-board?

In the early days of Agile, Agile was very much about customer collaboration and concepts like the on-site customer were at the core of Agile. Nowadays, most on-site customers (actually a term from eXtreme Programming) are some derivative of Scrum’s Product Owners and most instances I have seen are far from the role Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle described in their seminal work on Scrum in 2002.

Things have changed over the years, and nowadays a product owner (PO) in many places, especially at enterprise scale, is someone who devotes ‘a couple of hours’ each week to support ‘some team’. And even though this is definitely an anti-pattern from my point of view, it still is a reality we have to deal with.

The Agile Manifesto states quite clearly that “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” (4th principle) and one the biggest benefits of agile approaches in my experience is that they enable projects to start developing (and delivering!) before “all” the requirements are discovered. A huge part of this approach has to do with the fact that the whole team works on requirement discovery and the honing of the product vision.

But those teams are rare.

And while process-frameworks like Scrum – and the secondary literature around it – provide a lot of helpful guidance on how to deliver the solution there is very little said about the process of requirements discovery.

So I would like to challenge you to a little experiment.

• Have a board “left of the board”
  • Instead of just having a backlog and backlog refinement meetings where requirements magically appear try to build a board for this part of your process as well!
    
  • Have just a few columns like “idea”, “described”, “accepted”, and “ready for planning” – whatever fits the real way of work at your place.
    
  • And here is another idea: Unlike on the Scrum board, perhaps here it is not necessary for all items to reach the stage - perhaps it is good if some ‘die’ on their way to the iteration planning.
  • And then observe... What happens on this board?
    • Do items ‘starve’ in some states?
    • Are there items with different speeds?
    • how many items ’make it’ to the next stage?

Who knows - you might learn a thing or two...

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

P.S.: Inspired by Discovery Kanban of course... ;-)