Who Owns Kanban?
Lean Kanban University accredited Kanban training program there has been some commentary questioning whether I and LKU have the right to assert ourselves with such authority. These issues are worth addressing. The questioners suggest whether I invented Kanban or own it and if not then what gives LKU legitimacy to trade as we intend to do, offering standardized accredited training delivered by accredited trainers? While these questions are coming from outside the community and it would be easy to dismiss them as coming from disgruntled people with an axe to grind or sour grapes to squash, I believe the questions are worth addressing.
March 7, 2012
It is untrue that Kanban is only good for software change management work. Many people new to Kanban have this misconception mainly for two reasons. One is because Kanban started in a change management team at Microsoft. The other one is because David J Anderson declared that Kanban is a method for change management in the organization and that statement can be misinterpreted. What David meant with that is Kanban helps you bring positive change to your organization. Although the original Kanban description is around software it is actually context free.
Our Kanban journey began early in 2010 when we decided that we would build a product in the Kanban space that would address some of the basic issues we saw our prospects face in adoption of Agile methods such as Scrum and XP within their organizations that were historically used to doing waterfall or iterative or some hybrid Agile method that combined more than one type of processes. While the presence of established competitors was a strong reason to look beyond the ‘popular’ Agile methods, we also felt a strong appeal for Kanban existed because of its focus on 3 key fundamentals.
I recently participated in a local Scrum event in Bangalore and shared my experience in trying to implement Scrum and later Scrumban within my current organization. I have shared the slides below.The event was hosted by SAP in their campus and had a keynote speaker who shared the information about Lean/ Scrum implementation @ SAP and how they are trying to transform the entire organization to a newer or “lean” way of software development.
It was a great experience for me. The conference had a varied set of topics from Lead development, Kanban, CMMi (1 day), Risk Management, Systems Design, Kanban games etc. It was amazing to see this level of change, innovation and creativity in the Lean community and adoption in the industry. Companies and individuals are continually making effort to apply new and improved techniques and tools to the way they have been working and bring about greater productivity, quality and efficiency.
