how to use continuous improvement kungfu to pay down technical debt - kevin behr & jesse palmer

Date

how to use continuous improvement kung-fu to pay down technical debt

Kevin Behr Chief Science Officer Assemblagepointe Inc. Jesse Palmer OSS Manager Hedgeserv

Monday, September 30, 13

We looked at what was in our way

✤ hyper kinetic team

✤ lacked a structured system of work

✤ drive by management

✤ we sit between dev and ops

✤

Monday, September 30, 13

so we started experimenting

✤ needed a rock paper scissor system of work

✤ to contain all commitments and requests

✤ wanted to see backlog and flow of work

✤ yeah we used a kanban (leankit that is)

✤ we started a light weight continuous improvement kata

Monday, September 30, 13

our improvement kata

✤ based on improvement kata used at toyota

✤ each morning we have a standup for 15 minutes

✤ go over answers to yesterdays 5Q

Monday, September 30, 13

Target Condition

✤current condition

Monday, September 30, 13

five questions

✤ what is the target condition?

✤ what is the current condition?

✤ what are a few obstacles to achieving the target condition?

✤ which obstacle will you experiment on today?

✤ What is your experiment?

✤ (when can we go and see the results of your expreiment?)

Monday, September 30, 13

what happened

✤ our first target condition was to get all of the work in the kanban and make it visible.

✤ we did and we started noticing stuff like distractions and interuptions (aka Newmans)

✤ we had no idea what we were doing so built simple project plans

✤ we had lots of issues started doing RCA on breaks

✤ built a feedback loop to dev to fix issues

✤ we built a list of techical debt projects we wanted to get done

Monday, September 30, 13

paying off murphy

✤ we set a new target condition of putting at least half of our effort toward paying down tech debt as a team and still meeting priorities.

✤ we failed over and over

✤ obstacles

✤ better project plans - not overly planned just needed to est cadence and prevent driveby’s

✤ we needed dev to fix some things

✤ we needed a mission to help us stay on track

Monday, September 30, 13

slog

✤ every day one standup -one obstacle - one experiment - one 5q

✤ like climbing one stair a day

✤ we hit our target condition once

✤ we hit it twice

Monday, September 30, 13

we now believed we could

✤ we realized what we really wanted (our Stake)

✤ we realized unplanned work was getting inour way

✤ the kanban painted an actual picture

✤ we decided to use the kanban to investigate.

✤ lots of experiments

✤ lots of failure

✤ we recruited help from dev and brough another team in

Monday, September 30, 13

it is growing

✤ we are adding another small team to start expreimenting

✤ they are downstream from the constraint (us)

✤ we will add another team to our merry band

✤ now dev and engineering can see our backlogs

✤ we can coordinate ready and doing for faster flow

✤ we are running the larger system at the speed of the constraint (us)

Monday, September 30, 13

throughput is up

✤ we are now all moving toward continuous delivery

✤ it will be our new target condition

✤ we will remove or dis-solve all of the obstacles

✤ we have a simple method to navigate uncertainty (the scientific method)

Monday, September 30, 13

current condition

✤ our teams are building faster feedback loops

✤ we are planning missions together

✤ we can run “plays”

✤ we can absorb unexpected events without losing our memory aand crashing commitments

✤ people wait on us less (lower cycle time)

Monday, September 30, 13

Monday, September 30, 13

✤ Kevin Behr @kevinbehr

✤ kevin.behr@assemblagepointe.com

✤ Jess Palmer @crocketttubbs

✤ jpalmer@hedgeserv.com

Monday, September 30, 13