DevOps Cafe Episode 30
A great podcast interview with David Anderson and Dominica DeGrandis about the roots of Kanban and how to use it to introduce process improvement in an organisation.
Notes:
- Kanban = culture of evolution
- Original Kanban experiement at Microsoft was digital (ticketing system with database triggers)
- Toyota let people see their processes because they know by the time they've copied it Toyota will have evolved further and they know that culture is much harder to copy especially for western cultures at a neuropshycological level
- Guiding principles
- Start where you are now
- Agree to pursue change
- Respect the current situation
- Drum-buffer-rope analogy from "The Goal"
- Blog article: Understanding process of knowledge discovery
- Value Stream Mapping?
- Metaphor breaks down
- Stream = water flow
- Water can't flow uphill - IT releases involve rework that's hard to map
- Better: "Workflow mapping"
- Go around objections
- Create environment where people can experiment and come up with own unique processes
- Don't create new process for people - create a culture where they can evolve their own process & understand individual changes.
- Make many small adjustments over the long haul - evolving with each change
- Snowball effect
- Evolution gets you there faster
- Like switching to Mac - can't explain it until you experience it
- Pull
- Toyota don't do a pure pull system
- Users don't always know what they want
- Eg jaguar asked jaguar owners to describe what they want in the new jaguar design - they designed the same car - can't imagine
- "But we're a scrum/agile shop"
- Tribal reaction - emotional response
- Resistance to change
- Can't have logical discussion about devops
- Suggest a "super tribe"
- Lessons agile mgmt
