A Siberian tale of two Kanban implementations

LeanKanban Central Europe, 2017

Katya Terekhova

Introduction

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Arello Mobile - 8 year old outsourcing company, specializing in mobile

development

Pushwoosh - top-3 push-notification service

Initial state: ‘night is not an obstacle to work’• ~20 developers, 5 testers, 4 managers

• 15-20 ongoing projects

• 10-12h working day

• People often work late

• Lack of trust between us and clients as teams failed to meet delivery dates

• Deterministic planning

• Multitasking is great!

• Time-consuming estimates

• Resource utilisation trap

3

Scrum Revolution• Massive resistance

• Developers were sabotaging meetings and trolling Scrum

• Scrum activities sometimes were no more than rituals

• Question: “What could we do differently” was sometimes answered “Stop doing Scrum”

• Developers overestimated features in order to have greater focus factor

5

Theory of Constraints

• Got the knowledge of flow, bottlenecks, inventory

• Unfinished things didn’t have value

• Stopped falling into resource utilisation trap

• Didn’t know how to put it into practice

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Kanban ‘discovery’Estimates are not deterministic, you cannot know exact answer to the question “When this item will be done?”

Board design8

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Default workflow

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New workflow

Transparency

• There was initial period of resistance

• Eventually people admitted that it is more convenient for everyone: managers saw actual status of work items, while developers were not distracted by questions from managers

• Around 250 work items in progress (!)

Classes of services

• A tool to fight homogeneity

• 50% of all tasks were expedite request in the very beginning

• Gradually their amount decreased to 10% and less

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Bottleneck detected: QA 13

“Side-effects”

• Long useless planning meetings fade out since people got their plans from the board

• Fixed-date requests almost disappeared (they were a consequence of no trust between us and clients)

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Irrefutable demand

Then vs Now

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Then Now

Overburdening

People were often under deadline pressure, long working day, people work late, multitasking, heroic efforts WiP limits -> relief from overburdening

Meet SLATeams constantly failed to meet delivery dates, it was difficult to provide clients with reliable ETA

Trustworthy forecasts, most of the time teams manage to deliver on time

TrustLack of trust, both between us and clients and between developers/managers

Higher trust: fake expedite requests and deadlines disappeared

Estimates Time-consuming 'guesstimates' Estimates, based on historical data

TransparencyLack of transparency, actual status of works items was not clear, couldn't see our bottleneck

Status of work items is clear for both managers and clients, we are able to see queues, bottlenecks and make decisions based on this

CustomersClaiming for detailed long-term plans, abusing words 'Urgent', 'ASAP'

Happier clients, consider our opinion, some are even open to experiments

CollaborationTense relationships, developers did not trust managers, were sabotaging meetings

Improved collaboration, developers and testers are also involved in process improvements

SchedulingLong useless planning meetings, people got their plans but they immediately became irrelevant

Dynamic scheduling, people get their plans from their boards

Pushwoosh

• Separate product company

• Urgent need for a change - it was the only way to survive

• Used similar approach and steps we did in Arello

• System lead time (85%) is ~1 month instead of 3

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Thank you