The Kanban change team
At the Lean Kanban North America conference in Chicago I did a session on “Good practices to start a culture of continuous improvement”. I’d like to take this topic to my blog and today I’m going to start with a simple but very powerful practice which Sigi Kaltenecker and I are using quite often when we’re involved in a Kanban change initiative: build a Kanban change team (KCT). John Kotter would probably say guiding coalition to it. The Kanban change team is the opposite of the highlander principle “there can only be one”. Our experience is that if you want to make an impact then change rather follows the logic of “there can never only be one”. The KCT is a team-sized group who is responsible for the change process and who is actually managing all the required steps in order to be successful with the change initiative.
Now you might argue, “Kanban is evolutionary change and we only have to come up with a board and a culture of continuous improvement starts to emerge automatically. There’s no need for a team who’s managing any change.” Well, this might be true if you’re working in a highly motivated (start-up like) culture but my experience is that the vast majority of companies are working in different contexts. Although Kanban proclaims to “start where you are now”, its introduction follows a serious intervention of what you’re doing now: if you only consider the first two practices 1) make work visible and 2) limit work in progress you will probably agree that this is a considerable change of how most companies work today. Starting with Kanban means doing a change initiative! You do good if you take this serious.
How to set up a Kanban change team?
The idea is to make use of different views, knowledge, experience and backgrounds in your change process. So, whenever possible and meaningful, we like to build a hierarchy-bridging and cross-functional team who is driving the change like illustrated in the following figure:
The figure shows a sketch of an org chart. The blue circles indicate exemplary members of the Kanban change team which could for instance be guys from business, some developers, a team leader, project leader, the department leader and maybe the division manager. Here are some obvious reasons why a change team makes sense:
- Eliminate single point of failure. What if – for whatsoever reason – your single change hero is no longer there? Are you shredding your change initiative then?
- It’s not really a well kept secret that groups make better decisions than individuals. If a hierarchy-bridging and cross functional group comes up with a decision it’s very likely that its quality is much higher because it reflects a bigger audience in your company.
- Doing a change initiative is work and groups can simply divide up the workload.
In upcoming articles I will write about the work of the change team. Be warned: managing a change and doing a managed change are two different things…