Delivery Assessment Survey
Objective: Inform the relevant stakeholders about the culture of leadership and flow values of the teams and relevant stakeholders.
Deliverable: Survey report in text or slide format
The culture of continual learning and experimentation is a significant factor in achieving high IT operations performance. The purpose is to develop behaviours and values that promote managed risk-taking, controlled experiments, and collaborative improvement using scientific methods. Acts of leadership that support, inspire and recognise contributions make a measurable difference in Kanban adoption.
We’ll organize a specially designed survey assessment based on six essential categories for effective flow: transparency, balance, collaboration, customer focus, flow, and leadership. They are deliberately abstract, based on values rather than prescribed practices. Across these six values, there are more than forty different prompts, each highlighting the benefits or outcomes you might expect to see in a modern organisation that is working well. It will be for the participants themselves to decide which are the most importantly relevant to their challenges and how they might be realised.
In this example, as might be expected in any organisation striving to follow Agile principles, a degree of transparency and collaboration were already in evidence. However:
- imbalances between demand and capacity had a knock-on impact on the flow
- there were fundamental weaknesses in the area of customer focus
The prompts identify these challenges at a more granular and concrete level. These, for example, were three of their most-prioritised prompts:
We can consider the above metrics as leading indicators that drive the organizational culture, innovation, and the corresponding processes.
The survey can be run anomalously among different target groups. The study results will inform the workshops participants, and it will help us go deeper into the areas that are of critical importance to be addressed in the Kanban implementation roadmap.
High-level view on objectives, obstacles, outcomes, and roadmap for improvement
Objective: the teams develop and agree on preliminary objectives, obstacles, and roadmap for improvement.
Deliverables: (i) Summary report in slide format that includes lists of objectives, obstacles, outcomes, and high-level roadmap. (ii) Agreement among the relevant stakeholders about the roadmap. (intangible, still important deliverable)
We propose to conduct a series of workshop sessions that are fundamentally outcome-oriented, a clear departure from the prescriptive implementation-focussed methods. From the very beginning, they engage people collaboratively in identifying obstacles, outcomes, articulating them, organising them, and working out how they might be achieved and measured.
1. Vision and objectives session – Getting a shared sense of where the teams would like to get to in their Kanban journey, identifying needs, ambitions, and aspirations.
The invitation is simple. In the session, the participants answer three questions:
“What’s that like? How is it different from what you have now?”
“What’s happening when this is working at its best for you?”
“X months down the line, what will you be celebrating?”