The Kanban Guide: Self-Coaching Options for Teams

We are back after the summer break with a great session presented by Jose and JP.

Thanks to Neal Champion for hosting us once again.

Most teams exploring Kanban never go beyond Proto-Kanban. Although this provides significant improvements, we ask ourselves, “How can a full Kanban System evolve?”

When working at Ding.com, JP and Jose had that same question. The company had a wide education programme to introduce all its staff to Kanban. The next step was to encourage teams to drive their own improvements and support teams in their discovery of new ways of working.

At the beginning of this process, teams struggled to decide what parts of Kanban would help them to improve. They were like a writer facing a blank page: blocked and anxious.

We wanted teams to run more autonomously, select options that fit their context and develop their ability to experiment and discover things. To that end, the coaching team (JP, Jose and Andy de Vale) created the Kanban (Rough) Guide. This was set as an experiment where the Guide provided an extensive (but intentionally incomplete) list of practices related to Kanban. The Guide focuses on generating options for teams to explore as they look at ways to improve.

With the Guide, teams pull coaching support based on their ongoing needs, rather than coaches pushing what to do next. This completely flips the coaching relationship.

Having seen the results at Ding, we believe that this approach leads to healthier and deeper improvements to work environments, Kanban or otherwise. We want to validate this in other organisations.

In this session, JP and Jose will introduce their case study and show how they used the tool at Ding.

The Kanban Guide is available via

kanbanguide.com (http://kanbanguide.com/)

and its companion slack channel

kanbanguide.slack.com (http://kanbanguide.slack.com/)

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS​

JP BAYLEY (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpbayley/)

Jean-Paul Bayley is the Lead Consultant of Bay Spark Ltd., a firm specialising in business agility and organisational development.

JP led the Agile Transformation at Kaplan International and oversaw the significant growth of the development team. He is a committed people person and is passionate about the use of play and games at work. Colleagues say he is a "competent, good-natured facilitator that efficiently enables cultural change in teams and organisations".

JP is an n organiser of the Playcamp London conference, an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT), an Innovation Games Certified Collaboration Instructor (CCI) and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the BACK of the Room!”.

JOSE CASAL (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcasal/)

Jose Casal is a Business Agility consultant and coach. Starting out as a software developer, Jose quickly realised that he loved helping others succeed using agile.

He is intensely passionate about modern management methodologies focusing primarily on Lean Kanban, agile and strengths-based leadership. Jose is both a trainer and a student, striving to learn continuously and to help introduce or support the use of agile principles in companies. He has worked with large private and public sector organisations such as Ding.com, Vonage, Nexmo, The United Nations, The Scottish Government, Credit Suisse, Capita, Student Loans Company, NHS Choices, University of Kent and P&O Ferries.

Jose is the Founder and Chair of the BCS Agile Methods Specialist Group in the UK, He is also the chair of the London Lean Kanban Days (LLKD) and Playcamp London conferences. As an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) Jose teaches certified Kanban as well as other courses in other areas of agility.