About two years ago, we embarked on our journey towards Agility and Kanban was our vehicle.
But Kanban had people worried.
How can we not have detailed plans?! How can we limit WIP when we have so many things to work on?!
We have due dates to meet! And so on.
We would like to share one of the approaches that we adopted to help move the change along.
In addition to focusing on the Kanban implementation at the project levels, we adopted another route – to work through the individuals and the teams – a grounds up approach. We encouraged people and teams to use Kanban boards to manage their daily tasks.
You have difficulty in managing personal stuff? We’ll help you manage better!
You have issues in managing team level priority? Look what we did within our team- we have a Team Kanban and we are now much better organized!
One by one we saw people getting interested. The movement gathered steam - we worked directly with a handful of people and they in turn got their peers onboard. And we saw various flavors like Personal Kanban, Team Kanban cropping up all over the place – even in our Travel Office and Corporate Office. What this did was give people a safe, controlled environment to experiment and learn in.
As they got used to the ideas of limiting WIP, pulling work, visualizing work and “stop starting, start finishing”, it gave them the confidence to work this way at the project level too. And it made our lives as change agents just a wee-bit easier!
We welcome you to come hear our story about nurturing the change towards Agility by making it a grass roots movement.
A brief introduction to Amdocs - Amdocs is a leading provider of Customer Experience systems and services in the telecommunications domain, typically doing large scale transformation projects.