1. Joe Lukan
joelukan@gmail.com
@joelukan

3. What We Need….
• Delivery at speed of change in our markets
• Sufficient predictability
• Alignment of efforts to maximize value to
customers

4. Traditional Approach
Development work is:
• Largely invisible
• Highly variable
Organizations:
• Centralize control
• Fail to take an economic view
• Pursue false economies of scale
• Focus on people staying busy
• Try to remove variability
• Rely too heavily on plans
• Ignore queues

5. Delay breeds waste!
Knowledge is perishable
• Developer & analyst discuss a requirement
- A week old VS. - 3 months old
• Tester discovers a bug
- A day old VS. - A month old
Quality suffers
Motivation goes down
Business opportunities get missed

6. Agile helps, but…
• Dev team focused (suboptimal)
• Coordination and scaling challenges
• Underlying principles at odds with traditional
management assumptions
• Won’t solve all your problems
• Can put stress on rest of organization
• Focus on “velocity” can foster overload

7. 30% capacity

8. 60% capacity

9. 95% capacity

10. Highway Throughput
30% 60% 95%
Avg speed: 65 MPH
Throughput: ~400 per hour
Avg speed: 65 MPH
Throughput: ~800 per hour
Avg speed: 20 MPH
Throughput: ~500 per hour

11. Highway Throughput
WSDOT Sep. 2006 Gray Book publication)

12. Highway Throughput
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

13. Queues

14. Queue Behavior
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

15. Queue Behavior
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

16. Queue Behavior
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

17. Impact of Queues
Cycle time
Risk
Variability
Overhead
Feedback time
Quality
Motivation

18. Batch Size
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

19. Batch Size
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

20. Focus on Transaction Costs
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

21. Limit WIP

22. Limit WIP

23. Cumulative Flow Diagram

24. Limit Your WIP
Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story , InfoQ, Feb 28, 2014
http://www.infoq.com/articles/kanban-siemens-health-services#anch107610

25. Finding Leverage
• Stop using oversized batches
• Make work visible
• Focus on managing queues
– Capacity utilization is hard to control
– Cycle time is a trailing indicator
• Attack queues as they arise
• Queues have a quantitative cost
• Understand the tradeoffs

26. Constrain WIP at All Levels
• Epics, MMFs
– Eliminate excessive early elaboration
– Drop items as you add new ones
• Put WIP limits on all backlogs
• Manage WIP of shared resources, experts

27. Take an Economic View
• Understand full value chain
• Quantify cost of delay
• Don’t consider $ already spent
• Watch the work product, not the worker

28. Take an Economic View
• Influence small decisions
• Quantify life-cycle profit impact of:
– Product cost
– Product value
– Development expense
– Cycle time
– Risk

29. Manage Variability
• Standardize where it makes sense
– Automated testing
– Continuous integration
– Continuous deployment
• Make batches roughly the same size
• Include technical risk in prioritizing stories

30. Get Fast Feedback
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

31. Use Cadence To…
• Limit the accumulation of variance
• Provide sufficient capacity margin to enable
cadence
• Make waiting times predictable
• Enable small batch sizes
• Reduce communication costs (i.e. meetings)

32. Synchronization
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

33. Synchronization
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow

34. Summary
• Understand your economics
• Make your queues visible and control them
• Create a process to exploit variability
• Reduce your batch size
• Control cycle time by controlling WIP
– Attend to delays
• Sequence work based on economics
• Accelerate feedback with smaller batches
• Push decision making down (where advisable)

35. Additional Info
• Don Reinertsen’s website (blogs & videos):
http://reinertsenassociates.com
• The 175 Principles of Flow: http://lpd2.com/the-principles-of-flow/
• First chapter of the book:
http://www.celeritaspublishing.com/PDFS/ReinertsenFLOWChap1.p
df
• Al Shalloway: Not Doing SAFe? No Problem. Not Doing These? Big
Problem http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/not-doing-safe-no-
problem-not-doing-these-big-problem
• Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story
http://www.infoq.com/articles/kanban-siemens-health-
services#anch107610