Delay: the Kanban word for Snow- Fernando Cuenca

About the Talk

The Inuit have 50 different words for snow. Or so the legend goes. Regardless of whether that's actually the case or not, the concept is that a richer vocabulary can be used to convey a more nuanced understanding around something. Conversely, the use of a single word, while helpful to summarize an idea, it also can hide all that nuance.

In Kanban we like to talk about "bottlenecks" (and more generally, "delays"), but over time we have actually developed a richer understanding of different kinds of delays. Bottleneck is, then, the Kanban word for "snow".

Identifying, and then eliminating, sources of delay is one of the main improvement strategies we follow with Kanban. Therefore, having a more nuanced way of talking and reasoning about delay can help us do that more effectively. This is what we'll be exploring in this session. We'll discuss different categories of delay, how to spot them in our processes, and how to approach potential solutions to their effects.

About the Speaker
Fernando started as a developer in the early 90s (C++ used to be his best friend), discovered Extreme Programming in the early 2000s, carried the “dev manager” title for a brief time, and became a full time Agile Coach by 2009. He started consulting independently in 2014, and by 2015, he felt the usual “agile transformation” strategies left many unanswered questions, for which he found many of the answers in the Kanban Method.

Fernando helps teams and organizations to find better ways to get organized to deliver services, projects and products, using Agile and modern management practices, through a combination of team and leadership coaching, training, and advisory. He holds a degree in Information Systems Engineering, and Kanban Coaching, Training, and Consulting accreditations from Kanban University. When not working with clients, he's learning to play the harpsichord.