Lean concepts for the operations management - part 5 – HR KANBAN Board

Let’s talk about the HR KANBAN board. I explained the user stories which will go to the stack in my previous post.

We all met on the 1^st day, in front of the HR office glass wall. We divided the wall in to 3 main columns as follows;

Stack ( Where we put whatever comes out as user stories related to our HR

To do ( The most prioritized stories)

WIP (What we are working on)

Done (The completed ones)

We made the following format for each of the sticky we use..

Here you can see some of us getting the stack prepared..

We pasted all the prepared user stories in the stack. Now we go to do the following

1.Prioritize them

Prioritization is important, due to 2 things.. There can be very important user stories but still we could wait some time before we act on them. As an example, we have decided to create a new appraisal process for employees which will support agile team concepts in the organization. That’s a very important user story, but still we can have some lead time to start it due to the current process in place for this year. Let’s look at another user story; issuing the new version of “onsite travel guide” to the staff was a very high priority story as we had some upcoming onsite visits planned in some projects. So we managed to prioritize the stories based on the urgency as well as the importance of them.

Here we go prioritizing them...

2. Split them as smaller stories if they are too big to move.

This was a challenge. Can you imagine that.. ? Look at the previous user story I explained.. If we say “we need a new appraisal process which supports agile team concepts” that’s a very big user story..It will be harder to move the user story across the board. So its needed to decompose it in to a smaller level stories at the time of moving to “To Do”

If you look at the tasks under this appraisal user story, you can make few more sticky notes such as;

1. Review the existing appraisal process so that we can have a good idea about how people are appraised currently.

2. Discuss with the staff and find the areas where they like to be changed so that we can get good insights from stakeholders who will be appraised by the process

3. HR manager needs to talk with the Project organization so that she can understand the gap between the current process and the new process requirements.

Likewise.. We faced some big user stories which had to be decomposed.. and some smaller user stories which doesn’t need to be decomposed.

3. To do and WIP

How do we do that? Interesting.. initially we tried to limit the To do to 10 and WIP to 6. Any logic in that? NO.. We wanted to avoid committing to too many things which we cannot deliver but still to have sufficient amount of work and urgent work needed to get going.. But still .. we have not mastered the limiting skills J I will observe this further.. (Inspect and adapt ;-) )

4. Understand that there are tasks which will not be in the KANBAN board

due to 2 reasons;

1. Those tasks are way too small and routine.. so you anyway attend to them

It’s important to understand where we will draw the line for the KANBAN board otherwise you may flood it with all the smaller things you have to do during the day.. the purpose of us is not that.

2. When it comes to HR. In reality, there will be few tasks where visibility of them will be challenging even at management level.

Initially I explained one of the major challenges in our operations is that as its recognized as internal work.Unlike in projects, some of the initiatives never get completed due to other prioritized commitments … or drag too long..I think thats a common problem in any organization. But now.. all these stories are so visible..what we need is to measure the cycle time..

In my next post I will explain the challenges, benefits and other observations we had of our KANBAN board when we were proceeding daily..

Next:


Previous:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1 – How did it start?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN..

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

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

I think this post is becoming way too long..:-) So I will continue the rest of it in a new post about the wall !

Next:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 5 – HR KANBAN Board

Previous:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1 – How did it start?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN..

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN

Ok.. now you know what we need... we definitely need something more flexible..and something which works!.
Looking at KANBAN, we found that it aligns with our thinking in most the areas we are concerned about..

KANBAN allows us to ;

- Be more flexible

- We didn’t fix any sprint, plan days, time boxing or release days.. we wanted to plan everyday, discard plans we made yesterday, make new plans today, deliver all the time, allow most prioritized stories to flow in at any time. Unlike in SCRUM we cannot think of completing all stories what we have committed to do ( remaining story points = 0) in order to start a new set of commitments.

(Diagrams taken from www.versionone.com website)

·Be More lean

- We wanted to be lean.. and more lean.. That’s why we initiated this ..

· Monitor cycle time

- Yes we don’t want to estimate each of our management user story, Simply that doesn't make sense (I explained it in one of my previous posts)..Still we want to see when that’s raised, when its taken in to action, when it was in execution and when it was done, the total time period we spent to get it going.

· Limit the WIP

- I think I explained this before.. Every one of us had too much in our plates.. So some items were not moving out or at least not at the speed they should have been. Now that if we find a way to limit things based on our capacity, at-least we know we are not adding so much in to our workload unless we push some stuff we have already had.

· Have more visibility

- This is really interesting.. As a manager or a senior manager, how do you feel about this much of visibility of your responsibilities and visibility of your deliveries among your peers?
Amazingly that worked well with us.. as far as we all understood the benefit of this visibility of things we got to do across different departments/Sections. But I agree when it comes to areas such as HR, there are user stories which shouldn’t paste on the wall. In this case we have to be selective with what level of visibility is needed with certain stories. I usually don't like tools.. I prefer simple stickies on the walls. But in this case I understand a need of a good tool.

· Purge the backlog

- If there are many less priority stories not delivered over time, their value of delivering them will be reduced or those stories may not be valid anymore. So KANBAN will allow us to purge the backlog in every 3 months or so to clear out those items.

Next:

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

Previous:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1 – How did it start?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Our first preference was to make a management tasks execution model based on Scrum... But definitely we have the following concerns when it comes to Scrum;

• 1. Time boxing and sprints doesn’t work

We cannot commit to a specific time box and deliver only the committed tasks. HR department is getting requests all the time, IT dept is getting work all the time.. There is no way they can say … wait for 10 days.. We have to finish the current sprint before we book your air ticket.. So we know time boxing cannot help much when it comes to operations tasks.

• 2. We need to deliver all the time

Services of operational functions needed all time deliveries.. not any scheduled releases in every 10 days or 3o days

• 3. Story point estimation doesn’t make much sense

Estimating the story of recruitment of a Software Engineer as point 20 or 2^nd story of addressing a leave issue as point 100 doesn’t make much sense.. relative estimation will be difficult as stories carry functions in different context

• 4. No finishing and re-starting.

In a sprint we burn all the tasks to 0 and then we commit to a different set of story points in the next sprint.. Simply it’s impossible in operational activities. Activities flow every day every moment..

• 5. Many teams getting involved in the flow.

We have many teams sometimes working on the same user story.. As an example when the recruitment happens.. we have engineering teams involved, HR, IT and many other ..

So then what should we do.. How about KANBAN..which is more lean…?

Next :
Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN..

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


Previous :
Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1 – How did it start?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 1

Right now we have managed to go agile with all our projects. When it comes to agile, we are quite keen on SCRUM as disciplines scrum brings to the project teams as well as to the customers help a lot in our offshore project context. In our organization, some teams pushing it to the extreme while others take the process bit relaxed..We believe that if something works right that’s the way to do it!

Ok.. This is the story… 3 weeks back, while having a discussion with my CEO over lunch.. we came up this idea of getting our management in to agile.. It started with a simple conversation … “Let’s think loud….Why can’t we have a backlog for our management and work as a management team across our departments to be more solution focused...” :-)

Great idea …but hell ..it will be really challenging to do that.. There are challenges when implementing such concepts with the management in an organization.. how far we can use the transparency..can we have all management tasks on the wall…? how about layers within the management ? (Of course we don’t have huge hierarchy), is it only the management concepts of lean we need to add up..? …lot to think about….. I will discuss them later..

One thing I love working at Exilesoft (may be most SME level software companies) is that, no matter who that is, if anyone got any good ideas we can execute them in no time..( One of the recent examples is our recent job advertisement campaign which was quite successful. Few engineers came up with this new idea for a recruitment campaign and we changed our standard recruitment campaign over night. it worked!)

Ok..Coming back to the story.. We need our management to go agile.. But how do we do that.. ? Its challenging than implementing agile in a software development team.

First we had to convince ourselves why we need our management to go lean.. Of-course there were quite good reasons;

• 1. We have a challenge.. Our CEO spend time in Sri Lanka and Norway.. so most the time its challenging to have that transparency of the management activities while he is in Norway. Simple rule.. Status reports doesn’t work.. we all know that…
  
  
• 2. Some of the team members in the management team also travel frequently, so again how do we have that same transparency of work just like when we were collocated?
  
  
• 3. There are certain tasks in the HR dept, IT dept, which are always dragging due to other commitments (Which are not marked as “Critical” )such as Employee handbook, some New backup process etc. which needs to be finished at some point , instead more tasks are adding in to the list and sometimes we lose track of time of these long term tasks.
  
  
• 4. Management needs to be cross functional too to deliver the best and help each other.
  
  
• 5. Maximize the time utilization, if someone has got some time he or she should be able to pick a task or help another to get a task going..
  
  
• 6. We are a start-up.., so I don’t have to tell you the challenge.. we need to deliver more with less.

Ok we had enough reasons to go lean..go agile.. But then..Which agile would it be ..?

Next:

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 2 – Why not scrum..?

Lean concepts for the operations management - part 3 – Looking at KANBAN..

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

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