Contrary to Jim’s guest blog, here’s a story about my grass-roots efforts at implementing lean thinking within my control.
Although there has been some interest in the idea of surrounding teams, I believe that a true lean system/project needs strong executive support.
If you don’t have it (yet), then sub-optimization within a team or two can be a way to stretch your lean muscles and make some gains.
That’s at least the approach I have been using.
Kanban Implementation Question
Josh, My top goals are to improve my work and align my PM skills with the PMP standards. I have been absorbing your helpful nudges to this point (PMStudent blogs, Kanban and this email).
This brings me to the question: Kanban is a way to manage your tasks and eliminate?multitasking. This is a great idea. Where do you keep your master list of tasks that will drive you to your project deliverables, and why? You would think that you would be moving the tasks from the master to your Kanban board, and then back to the master as they are completed. No?
Keep sharing your great insights
Control/Sphere of Influence
Great question. As a federal employee, I am required to follow a waterfall structure because we have EVM. Although I believe that end-to-end Lean thinking would greatly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of any program or project, I am not in a position where I can implement agency-wide changes. This is a joint project so NASA and the USGS would need to agree to lean thinking throughout the value stream.
Translations
So I translate between Kanban and traditional project schedules that my team uses. The WBS is still used to deliverables. These are then turned into work packages and scheduled in the traditional manner. They will be decomposed once they hit my teams’ Kanban boards. Items from the pull queue will also become active work as they arrive. I use Kanban to translate the Kanban schedule back into traditional waterfall schedules.
Even though there are many dependencies and interfaces, such as in my project teams, you still need to have representation on a schedule or tool that has everyone. In my case, the traditional element schedules are rolled up into an IMS (Integrated Master Schedule). This allows for the various pieces from different agencies (USGS and NASA) to be arranged and ready for integration.
“The most difficult situation is when agile teams depend on teams with longer planning times. It is common for teams with different planning horizons to have dissonance. This can be very difficult to overcome. -?Poppendieck in Leading Lean Software Development
Your Thoughts
What do you think? Is there a better approach?
Is it better for Scrum-but to do Lean-but, or Scrum-but, if the complete implementation isn’t possible?
Boxed-In Kanban
