“Toll war’s, voll war’s!” (literally: “It was great, it was crowded!”), this is what the sipgate Blog had to say about the last Lean DUS. We, of course, could not agree more. sipgate invited Klaus to speak about the topic “Kanban on a large scale” and more than 140 guest didn’t want to miss out. First off, Jonas and Rudolph from sipgate talked about their Kanban journey which was, as it should be, characterized by numerous learning loops. Exactly as it should be, was also the impression that Klaus had while reviewing the Kanban system during the day: The sipgates understand Kanban to be the last state of error – Just like it is supposed to be. Respect for what is being done within this company!
After Jonas and Rudolph quite successfully introduced the topic of Kanban, Klaus did one better and described a Kanban implementation with 200 people involved. Those who know us know that this was not about 20 team implementations, but rather an intelligent Kanban implementation across several flight levels. The LEANability approach is generally not to implement numerous local optimizations within the teams of an organization only to then wonder why nothing has happened from the perspective of the client. From the consulting company point of view, working with individual teams is definitely more lucrative due to the fact that numerous consultation days can be billed, but the company to be consulted often ends up with the result “high expenses, no expansion”.  Instead of using this approach within this project, we put our money on agile interaction between teams. This is possible with little to no energy invested in change because the teams do not have to be “forced to be agile” in the first step. All we do is make sure the teams are doing the right things at the right time and that a momentum of change is brewing across teams. Klaus explained how this works in his talk. Have a look at the slides to the talk here. We will also post the video to the talk soon. We will keep you up-to-date using Facebook or Twitter.