two years of applying kanban at sap: a report from the trenches (alexander gerber & martin...
DESCRIPTION
You want to learn how to get from bad to best in just half a year with Kanban? Then this report is not for you. If, on the other hand, you are interested in how Kanban increases the chances in a team to focus on completing things, adapting practices constantly in accordance with the teams work context and within the few constraints defined by Kanban: then this talk might be for you. It is based on the experiences from a team looking back to more than two years of applying Kanban. The team is in charge of supporting a big development department (~2000 people) of Europe’s largest software company, with implementing lean/agile processes. In this session, we want to start with the reasons why our team switched from strict Scrum to Kanban. We will share with you how we tried to continuously improve the way we work (and how we sometimes failed) and what we changed in our Kanban system after improvement meetings (aka retrospectives): workflow, process policies, WIP limits, our metrics and more. We will show real artifacts (cumulative flow charts, run charts, our Kanban board), how they evolved over time, discuss how we used them and how they show effects of our improvement activities. We will also touch upon some drawbacks we experienced. Since we are also supporting implementation of Kanban in other teams with training and coaching, we’ll round up the session with some practical advices on Kanban introduction, based on what we have learned in the last 2–3 years.TRANSCRIPT
Two years of applying Kanban at SAP: a report from the
trenches
Alexander Gerber and Martin Engel, SAP AG
November, 2013 Public
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SAP touches
$16 trillion of consumer
purchases around the world.
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Our customers produce more
than 82% of the coffee and
tea we drink each day.
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Our customers
produce more than
79% of the world’s
chocolate.
© SAP 2013 | 10
Source: SAP
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About the Lean and Agile Core Team (LACT)
Spring 2008 – July 2013
8 – 10 members, ~7 permanently
Area: a big technology development unit (1500 – 2000
people)
LACT Goal (taken from our Wiki page):
Snapshot April 2010
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LACT working mode evolution: via Scrum to Kanban
? Project lead
Work streams (one person
in the driver seat)
Meetings for content work
Weekly sync meetings
Kaizen events
Support from Porsche
consulting
Product Owner, ScrumMaster
2 weeks sprints
Daily Scrum meeting
Planning, Review, Retrospective
User stories, tasks, capa planning
Sprint burndown chart
Physical board
First suggested April 2011; implemented
June 2011
Product Owner, “ScrumMaster”
Daily sync meeting
Review meeting
Planning for stories, no task planning in
the team, no capa planning
Retrospectives (well, often )
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Why Kanban?
Some explicit, agreed process framework was needed to manage team dynamics
Strict Scrum had some shortcomings
Planning overhead
Sprint as delivery cadence did not work for us (too much variance in the items we had to deal with)
Resulting in bad lead-time predictability
Board reset after sprint felt like waste
…
Fine-grained WIP limits, decoupled cadences, focus on flow and built-in continuous improvement
seemed promising
In the remainder we’ll walk you through our triggers for CI in our Kanban phase, the changes we
implemented as well as the results
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Deep-dive: Evolution of our Kanban Board
Based on the changes that our board
went through, we now show you how
the LACT team working mode
changed while adopting Kanban.
Triggers: mostly from retrospective
meetings
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Deep-dive: Evolution of our Kanban Board
Based on the changes that our board
went through, we now show you how
the LACT team working mode
changed while adopting Kanban.
Triggers: mostly from retrospective
meetings
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The Scrum Task Board we started with
The move towards Kanban was
triggered in a retrospective:
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Our Kanban Board: initial version (spring 2011)
The initial boad version was fine-tuned soon,
based on retrospective results
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Our Kanban Board: initial version (spring 2011)
The initial boad version was fine-tuned soon,
based on retrospective results
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Our Kanban Board, evolved version (fall 2011)
Subsequently, retrospectives led to a
continuously evolving board:
Avatars
Buffer column “To be reviewed”
Introduced “Waiting for External”
board section, with WIP limit 2
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Data for improvement: run chart
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Our Kanban Board, version 3 (fall 2012)
Analysis of long-running tickets, using the run
chart, led to further improvements:
Make preload explicit per team member
Special tickets for recurring tasks
Use avatars, and a personal WIP limit of 3
Make Lead Time explicit on each ticket:
one red dot per 20 days
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Our Kanban Board, final version (spring 2013)
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A word about the metrics we used
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LACT and coaching activities
Our approach: practice what you preach
(and even better: before you start preaching)
Sounds trivial, but it adds “street credibility”,
based on detail experience.
We wouldn’t offer Kanban workshops without
having used Kanban ourselves.
Adapt training content and approach
based on practical experiences.
From Scrum…
... to Kanban
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Our Kanban training approach
No massive rollout, just “word of mouth”
spread
Staggered training approach:
1. Short info session (2h)
2. Full-day workshop (1d)
3. Coaching (2-3 months)
We apply this approach since the beginning
(2011)
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Our Kanban training approach
No massive rollout, just “word of mouth”
spread
Staggered training approach:
1. Short info session (2h)
2. Full-day workshop (1d)
3. Coaching (2-3 months)
We apply this approach since the beginning
(2011)
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Our Kanban training approach
No massive rollout, just “word of mouth”
spread
Staggered training approach:
1. Short info session (2h)
2. Full-day workshop (1d)
3. Coaching (2-3 months)
We apply this approach since the beginning
(2011)
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Proven Practice: Triage Meeting
Triage Meeting: regular backlog clean-up
Effect is clearly seen in the Cumulative
Flow Diagram (CFD).
Most prominent effects in the “Themen-
speicher”, but also in later stages
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Proven Practice: Team Charter
Team-Charter explicit process policies
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Proven Practice: Malik’s Garbage Collection
“Systematische Müllabfuhr”-Meeting (à la Malik):
Regular cleaning of the backlog, deciding explicitly against topics
to be taken up or continued by the team.
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Summary and key points
Overwhelming success stories are rare (they may occur due to very specific context conditions like
experienced coach, background of involved people, type of work, etc. and are not easily repeated)
Applying Kanban does not automatically result in improvements
Even small, continuous improvements require hard work and a lot of discipline, perseverance and
relentlessness (discipline in the team requires buy-in in the first place)
But: don’t take this as discouraging news, it’s worth trying nonetheless! In the end, for LACT,
Kanban worked pretty well (as it does for an increasing number of teams at SAP)!
Thank you
Contact:
Dr. Alexander Gerber
Development Project Manager
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16, 69190 Walldorf
+49 6227-747474
Dr. Martin Engel
Development Project Expert
TIP BIT User Interface
Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16, 69190 Walldorf
+49 151 16810091
Appendix
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Which core properties/practices did we implement?
Visualize workflow
Limit work-in-progress
Manage flow
Make process policies explicit
Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally (using models and the scientific method)
(implement feedback-loops)
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