Thursday, November 04, 2010

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 4 – How did we impliment it ?


I think now I have come to the first part of the most important chapter of the story… How did we implement it.?
First of all I must mention that .. this whole thing is an experiment we do. (Didn’t you hear someone telling that “agile” is all about experimenting?)

Further, I have few emails asking questions about this whole implementation.. so I will try to be descriptive as much as I can.
I must admit that I usually get little carried away with concepts, especially when I start loving them a lot ;-) So when we were discussing our model, Finn (Our CEO) had to give me few reminders that it’s not about doing KANBAN, it’s about us being more lean and us making more productive management model. Sure! I agree.

Now… few challenges to face.. How do we get the operations management in to this thinking as they were not exposed to agile thinking before..?

To do that, we made a small presentation to the whole management team. We openly discussed about;
1. Our Vision to achieve
2. The importance of organization wide visibility of what we do
3. Why we need the whole management teams to move together, meet for daily standup
4. Focused areas which need improvements
5. Agile thinking which will give us drastic improvements, what our technical teams and customers achieved after being agile
6. How management can help each other across departments and work as one team.
7. Then we were open with the question.. do we go for this..?

The answer was.."idea sounds interesting.. Let’s try out and see.." We may face issues.. so lets start with one department first.. May be our Human Resource dept ....

That was encouraging.. So now what do we need ? We need a backlog.. Yeah I know how to make a product backlog.. But.. a HR backlog. ???. sounds weird.. Still we tried to come up with some sample stories to have a better idea..



Hmm.. Not bad.. the stories were flowing at no time.. Yeah we discuss what is "done" in each story..

Ex: what is done in 3rd user story?




We had a good understanding about our stories to be going to the stack (Backlog). Now we need to keep them prioritized. So We got some stickies, wrote them in the sticky notes, prioritized them and pasted on one wall of the HR area what we called the stack.

The glass wall had to have 4 sections as follows;
Stack | To Do | WIP | Done

1 comments:

TheoWorlds.com on 7:31 AM said...

Kanban for HR sounds very interesting, indeed. We saw it being used for tracking sales leads as well. It looks like Kanban can be applied in many areas.

Did you consider any online solutions, like smartQ (www.getsmartQ.com) for building the board?

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