4. Customer Focus
Core Practice 3: Manage Flow
Is this a mistake? How do we get from Manage Flow to customer focus? Indulge me for a moment—let me cheat a little, expanding the wording of this core practice to express more fully what this practice really means:
CP3 (expanded): Manage flow, seeking smoothness, timeliness, and good economic outcomes, anticipating customer needs.
This chapter focuses on customer needs and how to anticipate them better. Smoothness and timeliness are covered in the next chapter, on flow. Keep in mind “good economic outcomes” as you read both chapters; economic decision-making is covered in Chapter 15.
Why Customer Focus?
Task focus, role focus, team focus, project focus, product focus, company focus, technology focus . . . the list goes on. So many ways to lose sight of what we’re in business for!
Just as it does inside the delivery process, effectiveness upstream depends on the values we’ve explored so far:
- Transparency: The system must make visible the difficult choices that need to be made. The decision-making rationale should itself be explicit. Decisions are the focus of feedback loops (prioritization meetings, for example).
- Balance: The amount of WIP in the system is controlled, both to maintain a reliable supply of high-quality ideas and to force timely decision making. If needed, additional control can be gained by allocating WIP by customer, budget line, risk category, strategic initiative, and so on.
- Collaboration: The work of qualifying items for further development is shared among the originators of those items and the people who will service them. Instead of sucking risk into the system prematurely, all parties (and there may be several involved) keep their options open until commitment is timely.
Let’s see what customer focus adds:
- Whose needs do we think are met by these ideas?
- Are we meeting needs fast enough?
- What is the data telling us? What are people telling us?
- What might lie behind those needs?
- What needs might be going unmet?
- How can we test that?
In short: Can we develop a better sense for what will be needed?
Anticipating Needs
If there’s a single idea that I’d like you to take away from this chapter, it’s making the mental shift away from doing what is asked, taking orders, fulfilling requests, meeting requirements, and so on, and reorienting the process toward discovering and meeting needs. It’s a shift from an internal perspective (what we think we know) to an external one (what’s still out there to be discovered). It’s also a shift from the past (what we’ve been told) to the future (when the customer’s need will be met).
5. Flow
CP3 (expanded): Manage flow, seeking smoothness, timeliness, and good economic outcomes, anticipating customer needs.
Organizations often get deeper into trouble because people think that the answer is to keep trying harder. They think that better project management will fix a problem of capacity management (scapegoating project managers, meanwhile), that stronger functional management will improve end-to-end performance (when it can easily make it worse), or that people should just try to do better (when the system is fundamentally unreliable).
Kanban’s unusual solution to this problem isn’t to address head-on the roles of project management and functional management; certainly it does not set out to replace them immediately with other things. Instead, it gives managers (and others, too, of course) the tools to see work and how it flows in new ways, together with controls on WIP that impact dramatically on problems of delay and unpredictability. Allowed the right scope, the improvements and the necessary new thinking grow hand-in-hand. If roles then need to change, fine!
It would be a mistake to think that managing flow is only a matter of removing impediments as they arise. Typically in knowledge work, we see work items vary widely in both content and value, and we see the overall workload varying greatly over time. This means that there will always be a place for managing work proactively:
- Unusual risks and dependencies must be identified early and managed effectively.
- Looking toward the medium term, anticipated workload must be met with adequate capacity.
- Longer term, entirely new capabilities might be needed.
Being committed to self-organization doesn’t mean that you must always shy away from managing the most important work items more carefully. Not all work items are alike, and some are considerably more deserving of management attention than others. Dates—meaningful dates, at least—should be met. And when it’s justified by the business opportunity, it’s perfectly valid to sacrifice a little predictability and allow high-value items to jump the queue.
6. Leadership
What if [Kanban’s at every level] kind of leadership doesn’t come naturally to your organization?
Fortunately, Kanban doesn’t leave you to solve this problem on your own. When change is stimulated, it creates leadership opportunities both large and small. The more widespread, repeatable, and visible this process is, the more positive its impact on your organization’s culture will be.
Opportunity Everywhere
Let’s test that. Where can we find these leadership opportunities?
- Transparency: In knowledge work, things don’t make themselves visible or explicit by themselves; leaders choose to make them so. This is as true in the small details—the wording of a policy, for example—as it is in the bigger things, such as institutional feedback loops.
- Balance: Where are we overloaded, and why? Are our pain points obvious, or does the volume of work hide them? Is the mix of work right? There is leadership opportunity in asking these questions as well as in the decisions that may follow.
- Collaboration: Making an introduction, reaching out, sharing a problem, noticing how people interact—all of these can be acts of leadership.
- Customer focus: It takes leadership to acknowledge that the process may be ineffective at discovering and meeting real customer needs.
- Flow: Are you seeing it? What is stuck today? Where do blockages repeatedly occur? Why is that? These are everyday questions of leadership.
- Leadership: Encouraging leadership in others can demand real leadership on the part of the encourager. Kanban’s kind of leadership not only spreads, it reinforces itself.
What conditions are needed if that kind of leadership is to thrive? The next three chapters cover the remaining three values, namely the leadership disciplines of understanding,agreement, and respect. These get to the heart of the Kanban Method’s approach to change.
