Chuck LEAN Business Consultant
Have you heard of Enterprise Kanban?
Can you share your thoughts? How is it working for you?
The world of working is rapidly changing, as it’s reshaped by a demographically dynamic workforce, new speed-driven approaches to work, evolutionary management models, and a growing virtual workforce.
To keep businesses delivering value quickly and effectively, teams must leverage a variety of work methodologies and processes to get work done, such as Lean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, and traditional project delivery. That means organizations must support team flexibility and autonomy, without giving up visibility and management to broader strategic outcomes.
Are you interested in Enterprise Kanban and have you implemented any of it?
One of the most valuable and strategic tools for today’s business challenges is Enterprise Kanban. To change the face of their automobile assembly lines, Toyota manufacturing implemented Kanban practices in the late 1940s, improving process flows, reducing waste, and time to market.
The concept is simple: Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban visualizes both the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process. The goal is to identify potential bottlenecks in the process and fix them so work can flow cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput.
Today, leaders are leveraging Enterprise Kanban and the associated Lean-Agile principles across all aspects of business, from marketing to legal to finance, Agile, and DevOps teams.
As companies shift to virtual workforces, Enterprise Kanban is becoming a valuable tool. Wherever team members work, Enterprise Kanban can provide a dynamic way for everyone to visualize work and processes. The ability to optimize workflow and communicate status, progress and roadblocks can help Agile software development teams, business teams pursuing Lean and Agile methods, or more traditional project teams complete their work.
Each Enterprise Kanban board reflects a team’s unique process for delivering value, as well as its current work and capacity. This level of visibility is what initially made Kanban so popular for Agile development teams and has caused Kanban to spread beyond its Agile development use case. All types of teams and their managers, stakeholders, and leadership can instantly visualize their progress against team and cross-team initiatives or organization-wide initiatives/epics.
This eliminates the effort spent on curating spreadsheets or waiting for the next status meeting to surface issues. Leaders can pinpoint capacity, manage work distribution, and resolve blockers for their team(s) from anywhere in the world. In rapidly evolving markets, this quick access to data and delivery details can ensure focus, and associated funds are tied to work that will deliver the highest returns in the current market conditions.
Enterprise Kanban for Scaling Agile: The Power of Teams and Agile Release Trains
Digital Enterprise Kanban solutions are particularly a game-changer for scaling Agile and creating Agile teams of teams (ARTs). As organizations scale, Agile teams often hit critical mass, increasing work delivery and throughput. However, delivery can often become disconnected from strategic outcomes. Organizations new to scaling Agile often lack systems to coordinate and connect multiple teams to deliver against larger programs, initiatives, or strategies.