4. CONTENIDOS
4.2. CONTENIDOS ESPECÍFICOS DE LA ESPECIALIDAD DE VIOLONCHELO
similar reports from the field. Rob Hathaway of Indigo Blue was the first truly to replicate these results with the IT group at IPC Media in London. The fact that others have been able to replicate the sociological effects of Kanban we observed at Corbis makes me believe that there is a causation and that it was neither a coincidence nor a direct effect of my personal involvement.
I’ve thought a lot about what brought about these sociological changes. Agile methods have offered us transparency on work-in-progress for a decade, and yet teams following the Kanban Method appear to achieve a kaizen culture faster and more effectively than typical Agile software development teams. Often, teams adding Kanban to their existing Agile methods find a significant improvement in social capital among team members. Why could this be?
My conclusion is that Kanban provides transparency into the work, but also into the process (or workflow). It provides visibility into how the work is passed from one group to another. Kanban enables every stakeholder to see the effects of his or her actions or inactions. If an item is blocked and someone is capable of unblocking it, Kanban shows this. Perhaps there is an ambiguous requirement. Typically, the subject-matter expert who can resolve the ambiguity might expect to receive an email with a request for a meeting. After a follow up call, they arrange a meeting to suit their calendar, perhaps three weeks out. With Kanban and the visibility it provides, the subject-matter expert realizes the effect of inaction and prioritizes the
meeting, perhaps rearranging his or her calendar to schedule a meeting this week rather than delay for a further two weeks.
In addition to the visibility into process flow, work-in- progress limits also force challenging interactions to happen sooner and more often. It isn’t easy to ignore a blocked item and simply work on something else. This “stop the line” aspect of Kanban seems to encourage swarming behavior across the value stream. When people from different functional areas and with different job titles swarm on a problem and collaborate to find a solution, thus maintaining the flow of work and improving system-level performance, the level of social capital and team trust increases. With higher levels of trust engendered through improved collaboration, fear is eliminated from the organization.
Work-in-progress limits coupled with classes of services (explained in chapter 11) also empower individuals to make scheduling decisions on their own, without management supervision or direction. Empowerment improves the level of social capital by demonstrating that superiors trust subordinates to make high-quality decisions on their own. Managers are freed up from supervising individual contributors and can focus their mental energy on other things, such as process performance, risk management, staff development, and improved customer and employee satisfaction.
Kanban greatly enhances the level of social capital within the team. The improved levels of trust and the elimination of
fear encourage collaborative innovation and problem solving. The net effect is the rapid emergence of a kaizen culture.
Viral Spread of Collaboration
Kanban clearly improved the atmosphere in the software engineering department at Corbis, but it was the results beyond that group that were the most remarkable. How the viral spread of Kanban improved collaboration around the company is worth reporting and analyzing.
Case Study: Corbis Application Development, continued
Each Monday morning at 10 a.m., Diana Kolomiyets, the project manager responsible for coordinating the IT systems maintenance releases would convene the RRT prioritization board meeting. The business attendees were typically vice presidents. They ran a business unit and reported to a senior vice president or C-level officer of the company. Put another way, a vice president reported to an executive-committee member. Corbis was still small enough that it made sense for such a high-ranking manager to attend the weekly meeting. Equally, the tactical choices being made were sufficiently important
that they really needed the direction of a vice president to influence a good choice.
Usually, each attendee received an email on the Friday prior to the meeting. It would state something like, “We anticipate that there will be two slots free in the queue next week. Please examine your backlog items and select candidates for discussion at Monday’s meeting.”
Bargaining
In the first few weeks of the new process, some of the attendees would come with an expectation of negotiating. They might say, “I know there is only one slot free, but I have two small ones, can you just do them both?” This bargaining was rarely tolerated. The other members of the prioritization board ensured that everyone played by the rules. They might reply, “How do I know they are small? Should I take you at your word?” or counter with, “I’ve got two small ones too. Why shouldn’t I get my favorites selected?” I refer to this as the “Bargaining Period,” as it indicates the style of negotiation that took place at prioritization meetings.
Democracy
After about six weeks, and coincidentally around the same time that the development team introduced the use of the physical whiteboard, the prioritization board introduced a democratic voting system. They spontaneously volunteered this, as they’d become tired of bickering. The bargaining at the meeting was wasting time. It took a few iterations to refine the voting system, but it settled down to a system where each attendee got one vote for each free slot in the queue that week. At the beginning of the meeting, each member would propose a small number of candidates for selection. As time went by, proposing requests got more sophisticated; some people came with PowerPoint slides, others with spreadsheets that laid out a business case. Later we heard that some members were lobbying their colleagues by taking them to lunch. Deals were being done, “If I vote for your choice this week, will you vote for my choice next week?” Underlying the new democratic system of prioritization, the level of collaboration between business units at the vice-president level was growing. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, the level of social capital across the whole firm was growing. When leaders of business units start collaborating, so, it seems, do the people within their organizations.
They follow the lead from their leader. Collaborative behavior coupled with visibility and transparency breeds more collaborative behavior. I refer to this period as the “Democracy Period.”
Down with Democracy
Democracy was all very well, but after a further four months, it seemed that democracy had failed to elect the best candidate. A considerable effort was expended implementing an e-commerce feature for the Eastern European market. The business case had been stellar but its candidacy was suspect from the beginning, and some had questioned the quality of the data in the business case. After several attempts, this feature had been selected and was duly implemented. It was one of the larger features processed through the RRT system, and many people got involved and noticed it. Two months after launch, our Director of Business Intelligence did some data mining on the revenue generated. It was a fraction of what had been promised in the original business case, and the estimated payback period against the effort expended was calculated at 19 years. Due to the transparency that Kanban offered us, many stakeholders became aware of this, and there was discussion about how precious capacity had
been wasted on this choice when a better choice might have been made instead. That was the end of the Democracy Period.
Collaboration
What replaced it was quite remarkable. Bear in mind that the prioritization board consisted mostly of vice president–level employees and officers of the company. They had broad visibility into aspects of the business that many of us were unaware of. So at the beginning of the meeting, they started to ask, “Diana, what is the current lead time for delivery?” She might reply, “Currently we are averaging 44 days into production.” So then they asked a simple question: “What is the most important tactical business initiative in this company 44 days out from now?” There might be some discussion, but typically there was swift agreement. “Oh, that’ll be our European marketing campaign launching at the conference in Cannes.” “Great! What items in the backlog are required to support the Cannes event?” A quick search might produce a list of six items. “So, there are three slots free this week. Let’s pick three from six and we’ll get to the others next week.” There was very little debate. There was no bargaining or negotiation. The meeting was over in about 20
minutes. I’ve come to refer to this as the “Collaboration Period.” It represents the highest level of social capital and trust between business units that was achieved during my time as Senior Director for Software Engineering at Corbis.