Lean Agile Management Podcast

“Do things, learn, reflect, adapt, change on the premise that (hopefully) we will go faster each time we do that because we are addressing the fundamental process issues.” Keith Howells, Project4 Learning Lab In this episode of our Lean Agile Management Podcast, we discuss how Lean/Agile principles can be applied to the knowledge work domain. Our guests today are Keith Howells and Angeline Thorne. Keith is a managing partner at Project4 Learning Lab and an experienced engineer with 20 years of operational leadership experience in the Aerospace, Defence, Energy, and Marine sectors. Angeline is a partner at Project4 Learning Lab with a track record of delivering sustainable improvements in business performance in senior leadership roles. Both experienced in business agility, program and portfolio management, leadership development, and change management, today they will share valuable insights on applying Lean and Agile from their practice. The topics discussed in this episode: The benefits of practicing more discipline to project management by introducing the Lean pull system techniqueWhat do digital and physical simulations bring to the surface?The productivity paradox or how people confuse productivity with efficiency?Where to start the transition from “pushing in more work” to “pull principle”?What are some of the “push behavior” dysfunctions?How to approach planning in project management? Learn more about: Project4 Learning Lab is a renowned organization specializing in leadership training, development, Lean and Agile consulting. Through the use of a holistic and sustainable approach to learning, P4 Learning Lab coaches guide leaders and organizations to deliver outstanding performance. Project4 Learning LabLinkedIn Contact our guests: Angeline Thorne Keith Howells

“Kanban scales in a way that does not require bureaucracy and brings coherence to all the actions in the company, because it is clear how decisions are made at all levels. “ Teodora Bozheva In this episode of the LAMP, we are talking about project, program, and portfolio management with Kanban with Teodora Bozheva. Teodora is an experienced Kanban consultant and one of the brightest minds in the Kanban community. She is an Accredited Kanban Trainer and Consultant with more than 15 years of experience leading organizational change initiatives. Teodora is the founder and CEO of Berriprocess Agility. A company that provides training and guides you in the evolution of your project and service management practices, as well as your organizational culture. Teodora is also a co-author of Kanban Maturity Model: A Map to Organizational Agility, Resilience, and Reinvention and author of The Complete Guide for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management with Kanban. In this episode, we discuss: Can companies use Kanban for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management? What types of companies use Kanban for Project, Program, and Portfolio Management? What makes Kanban suitable for different organizations? Can Kanban be scaled? What kind of challenges does Kanban solve? How do companies apply Kanban? Learn more about: The Complete Guide for Project, Program and Portfolio Management with Kanban Kanban Maturity Model: A Map to Organizational Agility, Resilience, and Reinvention Contact with our guest: LinkedIn Twitter

"Starting work doesn't generate value, starting work only costs money. Finishing work generates value." - Klaus Leopold First, there was personal productivity. Then, everyone started talking about Agile teams. Today, it's time to take it even higher. In this episode of the Lamp, we are talking about business alignment with Klaus Leopold. Klaus is an experienced computer scientist and a well-known Kanban pioneer - he was one of the first Lean Kanban trainers and coaches worldwide. He is the author of books Practical Kanban, Kanban in IT and co-author of Kanban Change Leadership. Today on the podcast, Klaus is sharing with us his passion for establishing lean business agility that goes beyond teams. Business alignment and coordination might be one of the biggest challenges any leader faces. In this episode, you'll learn how to enable your teams and your whole organization to do the right work at the right time using the concept of Flight Levels. Team performance vs Business Agility We often think we need to have agile teams in our business so they would deliver projects faster. But that's the wrong lever. What should we optimize in business to speed up the overall delivery time? How to take the right decisions on the right levels. Individual performance vs Team performance vs Company performance Understanding the difference between team Kanban and Portfolio Kanban When you fly high, you don't see much detail. When you fly low, you can't see the bigger picture How to ensure the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time How to optimize cross-team collaboration for value delivery The impact of levers you can use is greater at higher levels of your organization. But if the lever doesn't solve your problem, it doesn't matter how strong it is. Business agility is not about the power of the lever. It's not about the performance of individuals, not about team performance, not even about product performance. It's all about company performance. First, company, then products, then teams, then individuals. But it's the company that has to improve. Contact with our guest: Twitter LinkedIn

"Drucker said a long time ago: manage the work, not the workers." - Andy Carmichael What if there was an easier way to get started with Kanban? Yes, there are principles, systems, values, practices... But all you really want to know is how to get started now. If that's you, the Kanban Lens is for you. Today on the Lamp we are talking to Andy Carmichael about an easier way to make sense of Kanban and your work. Andy Carmichael is the UK Director of HUGE.IO, public speaker, coach, author and co-author of several books on agile software delivery and Kanban. In this episode, we asked Andy to help us see what Kanban really is at its core using a concept he helped to develop - the Kanban Lens. As the popularity of Kanban grows, so does the cloud of misconceptions and confusion around it. While many people will try convincing you that Kanban is better than Scrum (and vice versa), few can actually explain it in simple terms. In its essence, Kanban is a way to see and manage your flow of work. All it really asks you to do is look at your work in a different way. Kanban lens helps to summarize that in just four elements. Here is how to see your work through the Kanban Lens: See work as a flow - from customer need to needs met. Think of your work and a flow of value towards the customer - this puts the customer front and center, no matter if they are inside or outside of your organization. See workflow as a sequence of knowledge discovery steps - every work stage is there for us to learn something. Once we know enough, we deliver our finding. See knowledge work as a service - our instinct is to manage the things that are visible. This way we end up managing the people and not the work. Instead, think about your work as a service and manage it the same way. See organizations as a network of services - each service is interdependent inside an organization, so think about the end-to-end process. Among other things, here is what we've covered in this episode: How to get started with Kanban Viewing your organization through the Kanban lens Difference between kanban signaling technique and Kanban method for Knowledge work. Applicability of Kanban outside of IT and Software Development Being busy vs seeing work getting finished Applying the decades of work management findings to work today Taking Kanban to the organizational level Optimizing whole organization service by service How to promote a change that will stick Looking into the future In the end, Kanban is not a pre-canned solution. It's a tool that invites you to look at your work yourself and decide for yourself what needs to be changed. See what you're unhappy with, what your customer and your workers are unhappy with and your customers, your workers, start from there. Don't do what worked for someone else. Start where you are, make your work visible, make issues visible. You will then make the change that sticks, change things that are really broken, don't change things for change's sake. People need to know the reasons why things are done. Start from where you are and grow from there.

Is team Kanban really enough to achieve Business Agility? If you already practice Kanban, you are probably enjoying the visibility and efficiency it brings on the team level. However, the joys of having agility in a siloed team wear off quickly if the rest of the organization is inefficient and slow. The answer? Let me introduce you to Portfolio Kanban. Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we're talking about scaling Kanban to the organizational or the project portfolio level. Some like to say that Kanban is just for small teams. Our guest proves them wrong, as he works with groups as large as 1800 people. In this episode, you will learn how to apply Kanban end-to-end at the system level. We're talking today to Nader Talai, who is a professional IT manager, the organizer for the London Limited WIP Society and Business Agility Consultant at Value Glide. In this episode, he walked us through a range of hot topics about scaling Kanban to the portfolio level and making this a change that lasts. Here are the key questions we've covered: How to make Business Agility a change that lasts? Stop focusing on practices and labels, think about the outcomes and results you are trying to achieve using Kanban or any other tool. Nader tells us how to adopt Portfolio Kanban with the positive outcomes and lasting change in mind. What causes a high rate of expedite tasks and how to deal with them When your team is constantly putting out fires, you need to ask yourself what's the reason behind all of the expedite tasks? Nader walks us through the root cause behind the endless stream of "urgent" tasks. Is Kanban effective only for small teams? Myth or reality? What kind of teams can benefit from Kanban? How can we use Kanban on portfolio level? How to do less as an organization to achieve more? Is it possible to effectively limit work in progress on the organizational level? How to achieve work predictability at the portfolio level with Kanban Pull? The unexpected downsides of high resource utilization While it might seem like the most logical thing to do, aiming for 100% resource utilization (aka keeping everyone and everything busy) can be bad for your organization. We discussed how Portfolio Kanban lets us focus on and manage the Flow of work instead of simply keeping people busy. Kanban planning: how to set up realistic goals and expectations With all the great promises Agile and Lean worlds offer, you might be tempted to "account for it" in your goal setting process. Nader brings up the topic of setting up the right expectations in Kanban planning. Adopting Portfolio Kanban: how to get top management buy-in? Convincing stakeholders that changing the way teams or whole organizations work is not the easiest of tasks. In the interview, you'll learn how to get the top management buy-in for practicing Pull principle and Portfolio Kanban. Looking for more on the topic of Portfolio Kanban and scaling Kanban to the company level? Here are some useful resources on the topic: What is Portfolio Kanban? Implementing a Kanban Roadmap What are WIP limits and how to use them to boost productivity How to Set and Manage WIP Limits on Portfolio Level Understanding Pull Systems Did you find out something new? What should we ask our next guest and who should it be? Let us know down in the comments.

"You want happy staff. You become more productive as the manager because you don't have to deal with the hassles." - Judy Rees Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we're talking to Judy Rees about effective communication in complex environments to learn how to improve team communication at work using a method called Clean Language. From the famous feedback sandwich to the Nonviolent Communication method, managers everywhere are eager to find an effective way to overcome the communication hurdles of a modern workplace. Different cultural backgrounds, distributed and remote teams make it even harder for contributors and managers to communicate effectively. Having poor communication in teams leads to misunderstandings and conflicts. Insufficient or ineffective communication is reported to have a direct effect on employee engagement, high employee turnover, and can even be the reason behind missed goals. Together, all these side effects lead to stress and anxious people are even harder to communicate with. Sounds like a vicious circle, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great, if we could just glimpse into someone else's mind and just see why they do things the way they do? See what kind of meanings hide behind the words people say. The answer you’re looking for might be the Clean Language method. To understand what that is and how to use it, we’ve invited Judy Rees - a public speaker, trainer, and consultant as well as a co-author of a bestselling book called Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds. Clean Language is a method initially devised by David Grove to help therapy clients explore their inner thoughts. In essence, it’s a very specific precision inquiry technique that’s built on the idea of probe request and response. The ultimate goal is to find out what it is that somebody really means by what they're saying even when they don't know themselves. The key points covered in the episode: The biggest challenge for modern management How to communicate effectively in highly unstable and complex environments Boosting team morale, company profits, and manager’s well-being with good communication What is Clean Language and how can it help you deal with business challenges? Giving feedback and understanding problematic employees Importance of effective communication (listening) skills in conflict resolution How to learn what's necessary for people to work at their best. Further Reading: “How to create a collaborative culture?” “Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors And Opening Minds” - book by Judy Rees How Do Agile Practitioners Benefit From Learning Clean Language? “From Contempt to Curiosity” - book by Caitlin Walker Shared leadership and self-organized teams Contact our guest: LinkedIn Twitter Website

“Business Agility is not an option. It’s a matter of business survival.” - Jose Casal Will your business be around in 10 years or will you be replaced by a newcomer? How long does it take for your business to deliver a new product from the idea to the market? If questions like these make you worried, it's probably time to talk about business agility. This time on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we are talking to Jose Casal, who is a Business Agility Coach with experience working in both private and public sectors. Jose is a public speaker, chairman of the Agile Methods Specialist Group at BCS Chartered Institute for IT and is the founder of Actineo Consulting. Business Agility is not an option. It’s a matter of business survival. In this episode: Understanding what Business Agility means in practical terms Flow & Fit for purpose Learning Impact People 3 Myths of Product Development vs 3 Facts of Agile Business Practices Myth: Customers know what they want. Fact: The customers discover what they want as they go Myth: We know how to build it. Fact: We only have an approximate idea of what we want to do. We don't know how we're going to deliver until you actually deliver. Myth: Nothing's going to change. Fact: Everything will change. We should be expecting change. Culture of Discovery and Learning The toxicity of "Follow me" culture vs discovering the right solution dynamically through discovery In an Agile business, you need to be learning constantly. How are you learning? Managers should be the agile engine of learning and experimentation culture. Allow people to make mistakes. The importance of psychological safety to make mistakes and let people try things. Little by little. Problems vs Solutions In traditional management and IT education, we are schooled to be constantly looking for solutions. Stop thinking about the solutions. First, we need to be better at understanding the problems, asking about the needs before we start offering solutions. How to achieve business agility? Which method is best? Forget the methods - this is going back to thinking about a solution but what's the problem that you are trying to solve with that? Why do we need to change? What's the better kind of world are you chasing? We need a regular re-evaluation of our strategy. Traditional strategy lacks reflection, adaptation, engagement of the people who are delivering the change The hardest thing to change in an organization is not the culture, process, or boss. How to approach change management as an agile business? How can I encourage others to change? How can I get people to do things differently? Missing out on Business Agility - the answer for the skeptics Skipping agile? This is the start of a eulogy of your company Old banks vs Agile financial companies. Who wins? Much smaller firms, which are fast to deliver, perform quick experiments are disrupting centuries-old banks These little industry disruptors are out there to kill you and they will No, it's not the matter of the industry. Banking, insurance and automotive industries are all going agile with or without you The future of business is agile by default. Business agility is not just an option anymore.

"You are going to see things that you don't want to see... but it's something that you need to do if you want to improve your business." - Annette Vendelbo Would you like predictability in your projects? Would you like to deliver faster and with higher quality? Business agility is no longer a dream of revolutionary organizations, it's the new requirement of the modern economy and free market. However, how do you get there? The key first step is transparency. This time on the LAMP, we are talking to Annette Vendelbo about the need for higher organizational transparency in business. She is the director and founder of Xvoto, an accredited Kanban trainer and Agile coach, as well as a passionate public speaker on the topics of business agility and transparency. Annette has been deeply engaged in project management since 1995. She has been a member of the PMI Denmark Chapter board of directors since 2005 and was elected President in 2011. Her project management experience is acquired working in both private and public sectors, establishing the building blocks that ensure project success in both sectors given their different ecosystem. In this episode, Annette explains why transparency is a quintessential part a healthy organization and why it is an unavoidable step towards real business agility. Lean Agile Management Podcast (aka LAMP) is a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. Contact our guest: Twitter | LinkedIn | Xvoto Can't listen to the podcast now? Here is how Annette summarized the topic herself. Enjoy! Transparency, And Why Agility Will Not Work Without It When I work with clients to help them transform towards higher organizational agility, I get lots of negative reactions to agile key principles. To many, these principles seem counterintuitive to their current way of working. But what disturbs the agile opponents the most is transparency, which is one of the fundamentals in e.g. Scrum and Kanban. And, by the way, a prerequisite for improvement. Even if most buy in to the idea that if you cannot see what happens in your system, i.e. your project, your department, your team, etc. you do not have a baseline for improvements and you cannot react sensibly and timely to whatever is disturbing the flow (=progress) in your system. I often experience that people resist showing what they are working on and how. This happens at the individual, the team, and the managerial level. But why? Well, mainly out of fear of making it visible that: Everyone (managers too) make mistakes We may not handle dependencies very well We might do things that don’t really make sense Some are not as busy as they should be (and pretend to be) We are not in control of our processes We do not produce the results we could To cut a long story short, many don’t want to know and are afraid of discovering what is really going on, because when you get to see “bad stuff” in your system, it might point to something you or your team did or could do something about. It makes you responsible for reacting on what you discover and for not letting the “bad stuff” continue. Where does fear of transparency come from? Well, there are 3 answers: Culture Culture Culture If errors are not accepted in your company, you will most likely want to hide your mistakes. Transparency makes that impossible. If top-down management is the norm in your company, you are not expected to question the orders you get. Even if you can clearly see that they will lead in the wrong direction. Managers that thrive on this management style will work against transparency, as this would put a big finger on the sore spots of their decisions, strategies etc. If it is (silently) accepted in your company that not all employees are equally busy and that some do not assume responsibility or show leadership,

"If from your strategy you can't identify anything that you would say no to, it's probably not a good strategy." - Karl Scotland Strategy Execution is Hard. Creating Strategy is Even Harder. Are you struggling with too many conflicting priorities? Constantly dealing with short-term unachievable targets that only send the whole team into a total burnout without any real result? You are not alone. Developing a strategy that leads to a successful execution is one of the biggest issues managers report to struggle with today. As revealed in a survey by PwC’s Strategy, which involved 2,800 executives from companies of various sizes, geographies, and industries, 82% of executives say that growth initiatives companies do commit to lead to at least partial waste. Converting strategic decisions into specific actions, allocating resources to support the success of the strategy, achieving an alignment of the day-to-day activities with the bigger objectives and strategic initiatives - all of these are the challenges managers and executives face every day. In this context, how can a leader build a successful strategy that would make sense at every level of business? Unfortunately, as stated in the same survey, almost half of the executives in question decided not to set a specific action at all - 49% stated their company has no list of strategic priorities. Is having no strategy really an answer? How to Build and Execute a Strategy to Get Real Results Today on Lean Agile Management Podcast, we are looking for a definitive answer to Lean-Agile strategy execution with Karl Scotland. Karl is a Strategy Deployment expert and a professional Lean and Agile consultant, who helped clients like BBC, Yahoo, Cisco, and others. In this episode: How to create an end-to-end alignment of tasks, tactics, initiatives, and strategy? How to give autonomy while avoiding a total chaos and unpredictability in execution? How to use feedback to prevent second-guessing, deadly misunderstandings and unalignment? Who is responsible for creating the strategy? What, who and how comes up with the tactics and tasks? How to execute strategy with a focus on true business benefits? TASTE True North Aspirations Strategy Tactics Evidence Using Hoshin Kanri X matrics to visualize the strategy and related work Future backward exercise as a tool for breaking boxed thinking, draw out How get people to buy-into the strategic ideas? Continuous strategy and tactics adjustment and evaluation. How do we know our strategy is (not) working? Failure is absolutely necessary to a strategic success, Why everyone needs to learn to fail Further reading and mentioned resources: What is A3 problem-solving? Understanding Lean model of shared leadership Catchball as a tool for strategic feedback collection What is Hoshin Kanri X matrix? Free downloadable templates of X Matrix and A3's by Karl Scotland Book Recommendations by Karl Scotland: Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Playing to Win Art of Action Turn the Ship Around Future Backwards Guest Details: Twitter | LinkedIn | AvailAgility LAMP or (Lean Agile Management Podcast) is a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts.

"Failure is not an option. Failure is a necessity. We actually have to fail." - Karl Scotland Strategy Execution is Hard. Creating Strategy is Even Harder. Are you struggling with too many conflicting priorities? Constantly dealing with short-term unachievable targets that only send the whole team into a total burnout without any real result? You are not alone. Developing a strategy that leads to a successful execution is one of the biggest issues managers report to struggle with today. As...

"Without having the understanding of what customer values, teams are going to turn to vanity metrics " - Matt Philip Who is your customer? Do you truly understand their pains and needs? Did you prove that with the way you build and deliver your products or design your services? The chances are, if you can give strong positive answers to these questions, your customers trust you. If that's so, you can go on to the next article. However, if you don't have clear answers to these questions, you are likely wondering how to build a trust relationship with your clients. This week, we've asked Matt Philip, who is a Director of Learning and Development at ThoughtWorks, to explain the concept of Service Delivery Review. Welcome to LAMP – Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. "We're not a service company, we're building a product" Even if you are only developing a product, you are still in the service business. If you think building a product has nothing to do with a service or gaining customer's trust, here is what Matt has to tell you: "Most businesses are in the business of both product and service delivery: it's not only what they're delivering but how they're delivering it." Okay, you know your external customers. How about the internal ones? Are you aware of the customers internal to your organization? What are their expectations, needs, and pains? If you've never asked yourself this question, it might be just about time to do this. The things you find out might not be pretty but would you rather let your teams drown in distrust and unproductive metrics or enable them to grow together? Why have you chosen us? Service Delivery Review is one of the proven ways to collect quantitative data on whether what you do, your project goals and values are meaningful to your customer. Is your work aligned with what your customer truly needs? Forget the vanity metrics, it's time to perform a Service Delivery Review. Learn how to collect the quantitative data about qualitative issues and gain the trust of your customers both inside and outside of your organization.

"If governments can do this, then private organizations certainly can" - Mike Burrows Think going Lean is hard? Meet the person who helped the British government to undergo an Agile transformation in its digital services teams. In the fifth episode of Lean Agile Management Podcast, we asked a change management expert and a governmental Lean-Agile professional Mike Burrows, who leads Agendashift™, to answer the itching questions about transforming teams, organizations, and even governments into Lean thinkers and agile practitioners. Welcome to LAMP – Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. Everyone wants results, nobody wants methods As different Agile methodologies such as Kanban, Lean and Agile become mainstream buzzwords, managers and executives get method-fatigue and simply want to get down to hard results. For the passionate change agents, the job of evangelizing a genuine transformation becomes a much bigger challenge. It doesn't have to, though. Why are we so passionate about pushing one method, tool or philosophy over another, when all we truly want are the final value and outcomes of a true transformation? Today, we talk about kick-starting a Lean-Agile transformation without concentrating on the names but rather the results. Here is what we've talked about in this episode: How methods and names only make it harder for people to embrace real change Governments are going Agile. Here is how. How to concentrate on the outcomes instead of on the vanity metrics How to convince executives in the value of Lean or Agile without using any labels? What is the secret of the successful Lean implementation? Insight from teams. How do you convince your boss to even consider Lean-Agile transformation? Is it possible to push large organizational changes from bottom up or do we have to get top executives on board each time? Answers in this episode!

Turns out, all this time that you've been fighting unproductive team culture, inefficiency and lack of motivation in the team, money was undermining your every effort. How is money related to the success of your projects? In this episode of Lamp (Lean Agile Management Podcast), we are talking with Steve Tendon, who is a top management consultant, advisor and Managing Director of TameFlow. Steve insists that money-centered mentality and unhealthy emphasis on cost accounting is the number one reason why teams fall, projects die and whole companies fail to deliver. As opposed to viewing the world through the lens of finance management and cost accounting, he suggests we work on the three main pillars of successful project management: unity of purpose community of trust inspired leadership Learn what each of these means and how to prevent money-centered mentality from causing your next big project failure in this episode of Lamp. Managing and understanding Flow is not that easy sometimes. Making sense of the Flow in terms of business value can be even trickier. To get an in-depth explanation of the value that establishing a Flow will have for your business, read this article by Steve: Lean Business and the Value of Flow → Learn more about Kanban in our Zero to Hero Kanban encyclopedia: https://kanbanize.com/kanban-resources/ → Learn more about Lean Management principles and practices here: https://kanbanize.com/lean-management/

“We want to create an organization where marketers are proud to work, where they know they can get things done” - Yuval Yeret Who is Agile Marketing for? How does it look like and what are the business benefits of an Agile marketing team? Today we discuss these questions with one of the thought leaders driving this change - Yuval Yeret, the CTO of Agile Sparks. Welcome to LAMP – Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. The Interview Summary In this episode of Lean Agile Management Podcast, Yuval Yeret explains what Agile Marketing is and what it is not. He reveals the problems of the traditional approach to marketing and shows how you can set your team on the path to Agile avoiding the most common mistakes. We got the answers to these questions: What are the first steps in getting started with Agile Marketing? What would an Agile Marketing look like? What would the team operate like? What are the short and long-term benefits of a genuine Agile transformation? Debunking the Agile Marketing Myths: To better understand this marketing philosophy, we started with debunking the myths and replacing them with the truths about what really makes a marketing team Agile. Agile marketing is NOT just: Fast marketing - it’s more than just doing things quickly, there shouldn’t be trade-offs Reacting Issuing a tweet the minute something happens Agile marketing IS about Recognising the uncertainty of marketing environment, methods, and tools Thinking about your marketing in terms of hypotheses that need to be validated Data-driven marketing worldview Iteration, adaptation, fast learning, collaboration across organization Thinking in terms of customer journey, not just in narrow stages Do we really need Agile Marketing? What’s wrong with the traditional marketing? If the burnt out marketers who try to juggle too many things without any significant outcome is what we want, then we are good as we are. The catastrophic lack of collaboration between silos, long chains of approvals and heavyweight plans that never really get executes are not all that uncommon too. The “Big-bang” mentality means marketers spend weeks, months working on things that shouldn’t have been started in the first place. Way too often projects are dead on arrival - outdated, clanky and irrelevant to the market by the time they reach it. The Agile marketing experiment Yuval described a real-life 6-week experiment that he helped run where Agile marketers had to compete against the traditional marketing team in launching a product campaign. In 6 weeks, one team got a campaign in the air that they could start tweaking, while another team was still trying to decide what to do. Can you guess which one was first? What are Agile marketers like? “I want everyone in my organization to be a mini-CMO” Agile marketers think through the buyer’s journey as the whole not just about their smaller part of it alone. They take the direction and then act autonomously to get there. How does planning work in Agile Marketing? Is Agile Marketing about ditching the plan for the sake of agility? The opposite is true. You plan much more in Agile. In fact, Agile Marketing is about continuous planning. Depending on the approach you take, you would have daily planning for short-term initiatives, plan every 2 weeks, have an ongoing planning effort or a cadence-based planning. If you do agile marketing well, it’s a very disciplined and a very mature Marketing OS, it’s not chaos. What are the most common sins of fake Agile in marketing? A successful Agile transformation means a quality change, not just acceptance of a set of practices, mixing up a few principles and changing a few names. Yuval takes us through the most common mistakes people m...

“Any measurement system can be gamed. However, if I had you game a system, I would want you to game it in getting things done faster” - Daniel Vacanti What is Flow? Is Flow project management just a fluke, yet another mantra in management? What are the core Lean performance metrics and what do they mean? In this episode of the Lamp, we asked Daniel Vacanti, a renown Kanban thought leader and CEO of Actionable Agile ™ what Kanban Flow is and what kind of Lean metrics there are to measure it. Welcome to LAMP - Lean Agile Management Podcast, a show by Kanbanize where some of the brightest minds in Lean Agile management talk about how leaders can boost work efficiency, create a culture of high performance, and build teams that thrive. LAMP is available on YouTube and Apple Podcasts. The Show The Interview Summary In this episode of Lean Agile Management Podcast, Daniel Vacanti defines the three core metrics of Kanban: Cycle Time Throughput Work In Progress and explains how they connect to the concept of Flow and Lean project management. Below you can find some of the key points from the interview. What is Flow and what metrics can we use to measure it? Dan explains what Flow is and shows that establishing a Lean Flow creates the environment that helps us answer the two key questions of workflow management that usually disturb the peace of mind of every project manager: When will it be done? How many tasks can we get done by X date? Stop estimating. Start measuring what matters. Establishing Flow is all about building a reliable system for work processing. Establishing the Flow is the key to being able to give a statistically significant answer to the two questions above. With Flow metrics, you don’t need to guess or estimate when work on a project will be done. The Flow metrics give you hard data on the productivity, efficiency, and reliability of your production process. Lean manufacturing metrics are just as relevant for knowledge work Some managers dismiss cycle time, throughput and WIP, the Lean metrics that stand behind the idea of Flow in Kanban, because of their origins in the manufacturing industry. They say these Lean metrics are not suitable for modern knowledge work environment. However, Dan Vacanti insists that managing Kanban flow is about delivering value. The Lean metrics help you capture the health of that process, and that is relevant in every context. These metrics serve 2 purposes and both are universally valuable: Track the health of the process Establish predictability of the process Analysing cycle time, throughput and WIP data of your workflow set the foundation for measuring the efficiency of our workflow. Having this data, you can clearly say how much time work items spend in your production process and looking deeper into that, you can learn even more. What is causing bottlenecks in the workflow and where do we waste time? These are the questions you’ll be able to answer. The dangers of concentrating on just one metric of Flow You get what you measure, so be careful not to put too much stress on any one metric. Getting the wrong stuff faster doesn’t help. Don’t optimize your workflow for just one metric and don’t set just one metric of operational level as a key KPI. Even more importantly, Lean Flow metrics are not to be used for sub-optimizing for individual performance. That has a negative impact on both the process and employee morale. Instead, make sure every measurement of success in your workflow contributes towards the answer to this question: what is the main problem that we are trying to solve? Flow thinking is all about the value. Common mistakes and misinterpretations of Flow management. Not understanding the impact of WIP management on Flow Capacity utilization - using up 100% of capacity is counterproductive, despite common thinking Counterintuitive measures - in order to get more stuff done, you need to work on less

Welcome to Lean Agile Management Podcast - a place where we talk with the thought leaders and top-tier management consultants about Lean Agile transformation, answer manager’s questions and discuss the hottest topics in management & productivity. Welcome to the LAMP! Are you tired of putting out the fires of your team issues just to see them cycle back? If so, you might be extinguishing the symptoms instead of eliminating the root cause of your problems. Today we will shine the light on building and sustaining the culture of the continuous improvement process and how this key concept of Lean philosophy can help you solve the team management issues. We are joined today by a professional Lean coach, developer of Kanban foundation courses, and a certified service management consultant, Robert Falkowitz. Today he is tuning in from Switzerland to talk with us about continuous improvement in the context of team management. Skip to Comments > Video Transcript: D: Hi Robert, welcome to the show! R: Hi Dima, thanks for inviting me. How are you today? D: I’m doing great, how are you? R: Good, very well. D: I’m glad you could make it, thanks for tuning in today. R: It’s my pleasure. D: So I know you have really serious experience helping teams understand and implement Lean and Kanban, you’ve worked with countless teams in different industries but why did you decide to coach Lean in the first place? Could we start there? R: Before I got involved in Lean and Kanban in a very serious way, I did a lot of work in Service Management. What I’ve found and what most people in the field find is that it’s very difficult to justify the effort that you put into the improving the way in which you manage services. And I found that the reason for this was that most organizations have problems in the way in which they deliver and manage services; not because of the Service Management aspect but because of something much more fundamental: how their teams are organized and how they manage their work, how they manage the flow of work or don’t manage the flow of work, for that matter. R: And so, I said, in order to be able to help my customers better, it was important to help them improve where you could make most noticeable improvements and then afterward we can come back and fine-tune it with Service Management improvements. And that’s how I got started with Lean and Kanban. D: Would you say there are some general patterns or issues in the way we think about team management that the teams you’ve been working with could share? R: You know, there are a lot of differences from one sector to another sector, especially in terms of regulatory requirements. There will be differences in terms of the size of the organization, whether they are located at one site or multiple sites. There are differences in terms of the background, the culture of the organization and how it works. So every case is somewhat different and you have to be agile in adapting to services that you provide in order to help organizations do a better job at doing their work. D: Would you say that there are some biggest ultimate roadblocks or productivity myths that specifically prevent teams from becoming a high performing team? Well, what I’ve found is when organizations try to improve the way in which they work by layering on more controls, what they’re doing is fact, very frequently, exactly the opposite of what they intend to do. Now, it is difficult because people have grown up in believing that the best way to improve the way in which they work is to manage better, to check up more, to control more, to have better reports and to be able to act better on those reports in order to make decisions. And very frequently this is exactly the opposite of what the organizations need to do. So you’ve got this big change in the mentality of people, trying to get them to think in terms of doing less in order to improve the way in which they perform, rather than doing more.