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While implementing Kanban, I faced many on-the-ground challenges in my various experiences working with teams that have just started adopting agile ways of working. In this training, I have penned down the ways we dealt with one such challenge I faced to achieve the Kanban Service Delivery Principles leveraging the STATIK approach. 

Kanban Service Delivery Principle talks about approach to improve service delivery challenges. ~Kanban University ©

STATIK (System Thinking) Approach is a repeatable and humane way to get the teams started with Kanban implementation ~Kanban University ©

Problem Solving Approach while planning to achieve above Kanban service delivery principles leveraging the STATIK approach, teams face many practical challenges.

In this blog, I am penning down our experience in problem solving of the above practical Kanban implementations challenge to achieve the Kanban service delivery framework, leveraging STATIK approach.

Understand and focus on your customers’ needs and expectations:

We need to tie the concept of implementing Kanban back principally and make team understand why Kanban setup is created in the first place for this team. As a coach we must make team understand that the Kanban is setup for them to achieve certain right output (examples below) in their setup. This will help team to commit to this change.

In our case it was below:

1. To organize the work and make it visible.
2. Identify & improve on the bottlenecks in their flow leveraging this system of Kanban.

Do Some Study / Analyze History: 

We looked at listing down all possible tickets the team was working on from various sources/systems such as Remedy (production tool management systems), Common shared mailboxes, specific emails/calls etc. We then consolidated that data of last 1 month and tried to categorize each of the ticket into logical high-level buckets e.g., Generic User Requests, Machine Generated Common Logger Requests/Alerts, Specific user service requests and some generic and uncommon requests team used to get from these various sources.

Small Win:

We finally found that these tickets can be broadly categorized in say few 5-6 buckets only. That was our first small win! We then asked team to organize their tickets around these buckets. Team decided to move ahead and create “a bucket story” each day reducing the manual work of adding 50 stories. Team started adding a small summary information of what we are doing in that each bucket stories.

For ex. Ticket numbers from remedy system, mail references, call references etc. added in each of the story.

Focus on What Matters:

After the team started leveraging/following the Kanban process consistently for a period of 3-4 iterations, we started our observations from control chart in JIRA. It was observed that some of the buckets were moving fast and some of them were moving slow. We started with the buckets which were moving slow and looked if there is a pattern of what are the common issues. Team then started working upon them to improve at scale and not getting bogged down to individual tickets. Thus, principally achieving the best out of the system we created for ourselves.

Repeat and remove constraint:

We started following the process and we witnessed that the process is working for them - As the constraints were getting removed and they were able to get benefits in streamlining their work after fixing these commonly found issues/patterns or call them anti-patterns. Pun Intended! 😊