Transitioning from Traditional Project Management to Kanban
Introduction
Are you working in a traditional project management environment and feeling daunted by the shift to Agile methodologies? If so, a Kanban strategy might be the ideal solution for gradually improving your processes without the need for immediate, radical change. This blog post explores how Kanban can help you transition smoothly and effectively from traditional project management to a more Agile approach.
Kanban: A Gentle Transition
Unlike Scrum, which can require significant changes to your workflow, Kanban allows you to start from where you are. Here’s why Kanban is a gentle yet powerful approach:
Start Where You Are: Kanban doesn’t demand immediate changes to your existing processes. Instead, it helps you document and understand your current workflow.
Observational Approach: Kanban is observational, meaning it helps you monitor your existing processes and gather data to identify areas for improvement.
Gradual Improvement: By observing and understanding your workflow, you can make incremental changes that lead to continuous improvement over time.
The Benefits of Starting with Kanban
For many organizations, jumping straight into Scrum can be overwhelming. Here’s how Kanban can ease the transition:
Identify Problems Gradually: Scrum highlights issues quickly, but this rapid change can be too much for some organizations. Kanban allows you to identify and address problems at a pace that suits your team.
Avoid Bad Scrum: Without proper commitment, adopting Scrum can result in “bad Scrum” where terminology is used without meaningful changes. Kanban helps you avoid this by starting with your current workflow and improving it gradually.
Openness to Change: The best time to introduce change is when an organization has failed to deliver or achieve something. Kanban provides a non-disruptive way to start making improvements immediately.
Implementing Kanban in a Traditional Environment
Here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing Kanban in a traditional project management environment:
- Document Your Current Workflow:
- Definition of Workflow: Write down how your team currently works. This documentation will serve as your baseline.
- Collect Metrics:
Gather Data: Use tools like JIRA or Azure DevOps to collect data on start and end dates, cycle time, and other relevant metrics.
Visualize Data: Create visual representations of your workflow using cycle time scatterplots and other graphs.
- Analyze and Identify Patterns:
Look for Anomalies: Identify outliers and patterns in your data that indicate inefficiencies or bottlenecks.
Ask Questions: Use the data to ask insightful questions about your workflow and identify areas for improvement.
- Run Workshops:
- Team Workshops: Conduct workshops to discuss your findings and agree on necessary changes. These workshops foster collaboration and shared understanding.
- Make Incremental Changes:
Implement Changes: Based on your analysis, make incremental changes to your workflow. Monitor the impact of these changes using your metrics.
Continuous Improvement: Continue to collect data, analyze it, and make further improvements as needed.
Practical Example
Imagine you’re a project manager in a traditional environment where architectural approvals take six months. By using Kanban to document your workflow and collect metrics, you can present data that highlights this bottleneck. With this evidence, you can propose experiments to streamline the approval process and track the improvements over time.
Conclusion
Transitioning from traditional project management to Kanban doesn’t have to be daunting. By starting with your current workflow and making data-driven improvements, you can gradually enhance your processes and move towards a more Agile approach. If your current system of work is failing you, it’s time to consider adopting a Kanban strategy. Our professional Kanban trainers and consultants are ready to help. Don’t wait. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll improve. Get in touch below.
Thanks for reading! If you found this post helpful, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to chat about Kanban, agile, or DevOps, feel free to book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.
Recommended Resources:
Kanban Training: Check out our Pro Kanban training programs.
Consulting Services: Need help implementing Kanban? Our experts are here to guide you.
Further Reading: Explore more about Kanban and agile methodologies on our blog.
So the question is if you’re working in a traditional project management world. I know everybody has qualms about the word traditional, but what people have always done in a traditional project management world, and you’re I guess daunted by this idea of agile and the changes that need to happen in order to get there, then probably a Kanban strategy is a way that you can gain benefits over a longer period of time.
So what lots of teams and organisations get benefit from jumping to a Scrum process, right? It highlights where you’ve got problems. It very quickly identifies things in your organisation that inhibit the ability for you to move towards an agile process. But quite often, depending on the organisation, that can be too much too fast. You can end up with just bad Scrum. We’re going to call everything with the agile terminology, use the Scrum terminology, but in actual fact, we’re not actually going to make any changes to the way we do things.
So maybe a better approach for those types of organisations that don’t have the willingness to change—and by the way, the best time to change the way you do things in an organisation is when your organisation has completely and utterly failed to deliver or achieve something. That’s when people are most open to change. So that’s where you might bring in a radically different process like Scrum.
But the advantage of a Kanban strategy is you start from where you are right now. A Kanban strategy does not require you to change the way anybody works. I’ll say that again: a Kanban strategy, applying a Kanban strategy, creating and applying a Kanban strategy does not require anybody in your organisation to change the way they work right now.
That’s really important to understand. Kanban is not a way of doing things; it’s not a process in itself. It’s observational. It observes your existing process and gives you data and information about how effective it is being. That’s the purpose of a Kanban strategy. So you don’t need to change the way you work; you just need to document how you work right now. That’s your definition of workflow. You write down how you work right now, and then you need to collect some metrics.
Once you’ve collected those metrics, you’re going to look at them and you’re going to see if there are any patterns that allow you to identify things that need to change. That’s it. So one person, you as the project manager in your organisation, can yourself implement parts of a Kanban strategy. You can at least collect the data, right? You can load it out of Jira or Azure DevOps into tools. You can pull it into a spreadsheet and figure this stuff out, right?
So you have the start date and the end date, the age of the work items. Because you get the start date and the end date, you get the cycle time, right? How long things take to go through the process. And then you can do some data analysis on that. You can start to plot it in a cycle time scatter plot and look for outliers. There’s a number of graphs that you would definitely use within the context of Kanban, and each of those graphs are there to visualise the flow of work through your system.
Once you visualise the flow of work through your existing system that you’ve not changed, how everybody works, you’ll then see things that you want to have a conversation about. It’s actually quite startling how easy it is once you point out, once you do the graph, and somebody like myself, who’s been trained to read the graphs and have read graphs from lots of teams, points at some things and says, “What’s this? Why is this group of things kind of like this?” And then you’re like, “Oh yeah, I can see that too.”
It’s very easy to identify, at least initially, right? When we’ve not made any changes to the system, it’s very easy to identify anomalies. It’s going to be super obvious. You’ll have things like lots of dots clumped together. You’re like, “What’s that?” Well, that was a release. Okay, well, is that the best way to do that? Or you’ve got all of these dots way up on your cycle time scatter plot because they took a really long time to complete. It’s like, “Why did these all take a long time to complete?”
Well, we’ve got to get the Architectural Review Board to approve this thing, and they only sit once every six months. Oh right, so you can only get architectural stuff approved once every six months. What happens if you need a change in between? Sorry, I’m using this example because I worked in this environment. What happens if you need a change in between? Well, you need to stop work, put it into the Architectural Review Board, and they meet every six months, so you need to wait.
It could take years to deliver a product because you need to make changes to it. Those types of things you probably already know some of them, right? You already know that some of those things in your organisation are broken. You know it. A Kanban strategy will give you the data to prove it. And if you can prove it, you can put it in front of somebody who can do something about it and say, “Look at the data. I would like to run an experiment. Stuff’s taking a really long time to complete. I think this is the problem. This data is telling me that this is the problem. I’d like to change this, and we can see if the data improves.”
You just change your system. You just optimise your system. Keep doing that and you’ll get to the most optimal system for the type of work that you’re doing, which will be different for every team, every group, everybody, right? But that’s how you make that transition. You need to understand how the system works in order to be able to make the change.
So how long would it take to transition from traditional project management to Kanban? As long as it takes, right? You optimise as much as you need at whatever speed you want, and that’s up to you. If your current system of work is failing you, then you would benefit from creating and applying a Kanban strategy. Our professional Kanban trainers and consultants are ready to help. Don’t wait. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll improve. Get in touch below.
