Leave the Driver's seat to the Developers !

Two things at first...

Yesterday - the 10th of July 2023, two things happened.

1. spent an hour with a Team - they reached out seeking help on their #kanban ways of working. More about this is the body of this Newsletter issue.
2. Watched #missionimpossible #7 #deadreckoning #part1 - #earlyaccess for those interested (#like me) - 2 days before actual release. #nospoilers ! You can read on - for the connection to #1 above.

6 Developers, 100+ Items WIP

The team showed their #kanbanboard - I was shocked to see 102 Work Items in various states of their #workflow. When probed further, they said:

• Their team size is 6 Developers
• As soon as any Work Item comes to their backlog, they pull that into their workflow and start doing initial work.
• At such time, all other work which currently they are working - takes a backseat.
• Their #manager was worried about:

How can I give predictable delivery forecasts to my Stakeholders?

• The team's #productowner was worried about:

I work on too many things due to pressures from Stakeholders. I am not having a breathing time

Enter the "Driver" #analogy

Those who attended my trainings, listened to my talks know - I use analogies #onthefly to drive #meaningful #coaching #conversations.

After hearing the above, I asked them ONLY ONE question:

While driving to work, how many other things you are currently doing - checking emails, reading news, attending MS-Teams calls, working on some tool etc.?

You know the answer.

Multi-tasking is dangerous in many cases

The team's manager was speaking about multi-tasking. But that is also not possible while driving and it can even become #dangerous.

The road ahead for that team

We spent the 2nd half of the hour productively -

• agreeing on redesigning their workflow
• introducing WIP limits
• PO ordering the Work Items
• actively managing the Work Items
• focus on metrics such as #cycletime, #workitem age
• get better insights with #cfds (Cumulative Flow Diagrams), Cycle Time #scatter plots etc.

Just having a Board is not Kanban. Its more to that.

Time to switch focus on #ethanhunt

There is an interesting car chase in #mi7 - a vintage Fiat 500 driven magically through beautiful stone paved #corridors of #rome.

Even #tomcruise doesn't do multi-tasking while driving

Not a spoiler... but

On an interesting #punintended closing note - when Ethan Hunt receives his next #missonimpossible (if you follow the franchise, you know the #selfdestructive #message #mechanism) - from a courier company "Fast and Full". Is that an intended pun at #fastandfurious latest installment which also had a chase scene in Rome? (you might know the #fate of Fast and Furious X.)

Developers - get behind the wheel, Driver's seat is yours.

But don't forget to fasten seat belts.

#rawagility #kanban #flowmanagement #flowchoreography