KIK

Since its inception in 2001, the Agile Manifesto and its supporting twelve principals have encouraged many organizations to move on from legacy Waterfall processes and adopt Agile Scrum. At agiledoyens, we feel that Kanban is the next evolution of Agile and many of our solutions center around Kanban principals. Even the most diehard Scrum advocates must accept that upstream workflows that Product Management typically owns (Initiatives, Epics, Features, etc.) are not executed using Scrum. Product Owners don’t conduct Sprints, hold Scrum ceremonies, or point portfolio level work items. However, they do typically view status and progress via a visual Kanban board and the overall customer value stream from Idea to Delivery is usually viewed as a single continuous flow Kanban system.

Yes, it is a Cookie Cutter

You will often hear Agilists say that implementing Agile cannot take a “cookie-cutter” approach or that “no one size fits all”. Is that statement intended for Agile Teams within an organization, across different organizations, or both?  If you don’t apply some level of standardization to an overall Agile approach within an organization, then it becomes all but impossible for Management to understand what is happening across the organization. Agile frameworks such as Scrum and SAFe are designed to be a cookie cutter across organizations. You start with a baseline approach and then tweak and modify that approach to fit each organization’s unique industry and specific needs. Kanban In a Kan (KIK) follows that same basic concept. It is a “kanned” baseline Kanban approach for a customer value stream from Idea to Delivery. It is a cookie cutter that can be applied to any Agile Team in any industry doing software development. However, every organization, and Agile Teams within an organization, can differentiate themselves by choosing to make chocolate chip, sugar, or peanut butter cookies.

“We are a Scrum/SAFe shop.”  Great!  “We have invested heavily in Scrum/SAFe training and have no capacity or budget to learn or implement anything else.” Not great!

An organization that adopts a culture based on the belief that processes and tools will stay static for decades are applying the same failures of Waterfall to Agile. An organization that is built to last is always looking at new ideas and ways to evolve. To quote W. Edwards Deming – “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

Agile Evolution

Many organizations have already implemented Agile and are likely in the early stages of an agile transformation. KIK is not something new. It’s evolutionary not revolutionary. All the Agile concepts and principals that have been learned still apply and still have value. However, at some point organizations need to evolve or risk becoming stale and surpassed by their competitors. A shift from timeboxed Sprints advocated in Scrum to a continuous flow Kanban approach is a modest change that most Agile Teams prefer.

Kanban In a Kan is like a can of beans. We provide the basic structure that your organization can fill with whatever type of beans you want. Whether you choose French Cut Green Beans, Yellow Wax Beans, or Brown Sugar Baked Beans, KIK delivers a “kanned” Agile tooling solution in industry leading systems based on a standard Agile Kanban workflow that you then customize to fit your company’s unique place in the market.

We customize Jira or Rally to have a Level 3 Kanban Maturity Model value stream in a Product funding financial model. With the process and supporting tools as a baseline, we then listen to what aspects of the overall solution needs to be modified to meet your organization’s specific needs. We then tweak the “kanned” solution to provide a customized fit-for-purpose solution around processes, tools, and people that can continuously mature and evolve with your organization.

$3,000 plus customization costs at $150 per hour.