Agile India 2015 Conference- Good and bad ways to kick start agile the Kanban way

In this presentation Yuval Yeret gives his perspective about good and bad ways to kickstart agile the kanban way.

Many organization starts the agile journey with great experience. It starts sometimes with small pilot. Then the organization make it big scale and asks all team to follow 

Management requests all the teams to follow agile mandatorily. When organization goes  for such big change many groups need to support this. Orgnaization starts seeing the signs of trouble.

The results in such situations will be mixed.

What we can learn is pull vs push.

Let groups/leaders pull the change from "The market" into "Plan and Initiate"

Reference- The Culture Game, Daniel Mezick

http://newtechusa.net/agile/mandated-agile-part2/

Typically team do the mistake of just setting up the kanban board and dont do the structural changes

As in the above picture, there are different kind of teams like innovators, early adopters, the chasms, early majority, late majority, skeptics.

We need to engage in marketing through case studies, conference, meetups, identify and focus on agents of change. Dont try to market to everyone, find the balance. Clarify specific business case for the context. Ensure buy-in by requiring up front involvement from group leadership. Avoid rushing.. you want to measure "Engagement /Retention" not "SIgnup". It is easy to have the pilot successful but what is more difficult is to have the success in more teams. For every group we need to work with the managers first. We need to ensure that the managers understands the principles. Focus your attention on panaromic activities- Visualize end to end flow, Flow management, Retrospectives. If leaders "Stop starting start finishing" then everybody will do this way. If nobody in the organization picks a particular change then may be we are not offering the right thing or may be we are not making the change solution visible to the right people.

Someitmes the pragmatics look for full kit.

Should we use this best practice like Safe method or any other methodology , the best way to look into this is to consider this as a "catalog of options" not "guided tour". Make sure it is NOT your only "guide book"- keep it fresh!.

Key Learnings from the presentation: This presentation has provided the details about rather than pushing the new methods to all teams, we should have an approach of requesting teams to pull based on the market driven need. 

References:

- Crossing the Chasm

- Fearless Change