Hugo, what do you find to be  the most important for companies in the Kanban Method?

“The aim of Kanban is to make troubles come to surface” – Taiichi Ohno

Companies are unhappy with the quality of their work despite the desire for it to be good. I consider one part of the root cause is dysfunctional processes. Most Companies have a mail and calendar work driven process with meetings all day long and rarely any worker can get the chance to work uninterrupted until the end of the day or reflect about what is happening in his ecosystem.

Managers overload themselves and they overload their workers to, this is a reality in the digital era. The amount of requests and the amount of time people have to handle their requests is out of control.

Kanban is a visual pull system based on constraints that allow workers to pull work when they have availability. One common issue is most managers and workers don’t have experiences that change their intuition about how the work is delivered and when that happens doesn’t matter what policies do you have or agreements you do in the team, they will always try to keep everyone busy. They always start to manage people and rarely challenge the Status-Quo of their decision making process.

In which type of challenges do you find the Kanban necessary to apply?

Wow, there is so much to say about Kanban because the Kanban Method is about an evolutionary system and the bottom line is to improve & evolve collaboratively and experimentally based on a scientific method – This is a Kanban practice too.

Today Companies are increasing to provide services in the digital world so I would consider the Service Delivery Principles really a must, and visualize if they exist 

• Understand and focus on Your Customer needs and expectations;
• Manage the work; let people self-organized around it;
• Evolve policies to improve customer and business outcomes
  
  

What would you say to a company or team that has doubts about the Kanban method and principles?

Agile Thinkers have several case studies about the adoption and application of Kanban across several industries. There are clear patterns about how Kanban made a huge difference to improve prioritization policies and their visibility, how to signal when work has been prioritized, what commitments we took and why we cannot handle more work today, and understand the difference between effort and duration.

I believe there are many reasons why you should attend my course and start practicing with the help of a professional that applies Kanban in real business, real life situations and as a practitioner with direct impact on the business.

What changes have you seen in your clients after a Kanban training and coaching session?

Is clear the collaboration between the group of professionals, they understand what stopped them, collaboration and productivity increase and with that also morale  and engagement will increase, even without a bonus 🙂

Discussions are based on facts and with the board in front of them, less stress, and much less waste. The hard part is to keep evolving and improving … Keep the momentum and learn by experiment.

author

Hugo Lourenço

Hugo Lourenço is the founder of Experience Agile® and DevOps Forum, Agile Human Factors ®, World Agility Forum ®, Agile21® - Improving through people, and Agile Thinkers Academy ®. Hugo is an Entrepreneur in several businesses and its main focus is to understand how companies are dealing with better ways of working and how to improve their business outcomes for their employees and customers.

Hugo is motivated by his values and getting his opinion recognized, perfectionist and creative as well a strong believer in a better outcome from people’s work, although he has a strong need for personal (people) trust/honest/transparent relationships and also doesn’t expect less than perfection from others too. Hugo was a marine and he is mission-oriented, if your business, department, or team is in danger or needs to be rescued, this is the right mission for Hugo and his international team.

The experience of working closely with the leaders of many of the brands that have already started this “Enterprise Agility” process outside Portugal, has made it clear that the company’s to get ready for an “unpredictable future” should seek to rationalize the portfolio of legacy products, create high-performance teaming, understand why they do what they do, and their impact on the new operating model. Hugo team will guide you to organizational design & a new way of working, and that will emerge psychological safety, emergent leadership, and new business models through sustainable processes.
He collaborates as a guest lecturer in some national and international business schools has a presence in the North American, and European markets.

Skills: Cynefin, Product Management, Project Management, DevOps Trainer, LeanKanban Trainer, Coach, Scrum Professional and trainer, High-Performance Teaming, Emergent Leadership, Design Thinking, Human Factors, Risk Manager, IT Governance and Service Manager.

Expertise in Business Areas: Defense, Healthcare, IT, Telecom, Bank and Insurance, Utilities.

Some of his interests are:
Motorcycle, traveling, reading, surf paddling, skiing, bicycle, cinema, theater, orchestra, museems.