Jon Tyson at the Kanban Wall

I’m pretty proud of the work we do on our processes in Pollenizer. Our production  flow would be pure chaos without them. The starting position of all requests is do it now, do it for as close to free as possible, put the best people on it and make it perfect. Along the way this is compounded by the need to change, frequently. The Pollenizer team maintains a persistent eye on how things are being done as well as what and when then evolves the process as we go.

Our engineering projects have benefited from an agile approach since inception, that has helped us to stay lean and responsive to change. Combining this with the Liubinskas Law of Focus has helped us align the product and engineering effort with the business objectives. Recently the Lean Startup meme  (#leanstartup on Twitter)  has helped us understand a unifying theory of agility across an entire business.

Lean is the strangely named agile approach to production pioneered by Toyota. Lean strives for a continuous improvement in the production process, largely through the removal of waste (or Muda). This process of waste removal is called Kaizen. There are lots of groovy Japanese words to potentially confuse you, but click on some of the links in this post if you are a process junkie because its good stuff.

Kanban is an important element of the lean, agile approach to help us to equalise production. The word means ‘billboard’ and it provides the visual tools to for the production to pull resources efficiently through a process, avoiding waste such as idle resources, long wait times and failures caused by over commitment.

We’ve been using it for a while in our engineering projects, made more simple recently with the capabilities of Jira 4 + Greenhopper. This combination provides the best digital implementation of the physical Kanban walls such as this one.

A physical Kanban Wall for a project at the BBC

Here is a current project visualised in Jira/Greenhopper:

A Pollenizer engineering project managed through a digital Kanban board with Jira and Greenhopper

You can see three columns. On the left is the TO DO column. These are tasks that we have committed to for this 1 week project sprint. They are listed in priority order, most important at the top. An individual in the team grabs a task in this column and drags it to the right into the IN PROGRESS column so that everyone can see the flow. In lean terms, the task is being ‘pulled’ through the system towards DONE (the final column).

We need to work with a digital Kanban Board in projects because our team is all over the world and we need a shared source of truth for everybody. Meanwhile, back at the Pollenizer Hive in Sydney we need ways of managing the allocation of the team to the leadership of projects. We were finding that the complexity of matching the dimensions of timing and skill-set to team members was challenging and was starting to generate waste.

We realised that Pollenizer itself was a project which embraced all the others and we could bring some of the approaches we use in projects to the services business. Our research found a form of Kanban tool called a ‘Heijunka Box‘. This form of visual tool is intended to level the flow through production, ensuring that all resources are full, but not over committed, therefore not generating waste.

Bruno Mattarollo at the Kanban Wall

So we set Oliver to work with some blackboard paint and he created something, quite frankly, we could not live without now. Each week we huddle around the board, discussing current and incoming projects. While we talk we move post-it notes around and scribble with chalk. Each person has a row, each week has a column. Each cell can contain 10 kanbans, one for each half a day, represented by post-it notes. When the pipeline pulls more than 10 kanbans onto a single cell (one person’s week), there is a problem that we need to address as a team. The board facilitates the re-allocation of the team to keep us all equally active across the board.

Here’s some more pics (thanks Pierre!) of life at the Kanban Wall.

Phil Morle and Jon Tyson solving problems with the team before they happen.

Andy Coffey and Bruno Mattarollo. Conversations are more physical and get the mind working differently.

Phil Morle

Jon Tyson at the Kanban Wall

Andy Coffey