I’m blogging here a little less frequently at the moment, but only because I’m busy onblog.agendashift.com and our Agendashift LinkedIn group, where I have been previewing new Agendashift functionality as it becomes available to its beta testers. I could easily have made this post there too, but there’s enough Kanban and Agile content here for me to show positiveincline.com some love. And why not!

This week I have been using Agendashift’s shiny new charting functionality to explore the results Depth of Kanbanland 2015 survey (which is still open if you want to give it a try — please do). I was very struck by this juxtaposition:

At the bottom of the transparency category we have one of the survey’s strongest responses right next to a much weaker one (easily the weakest of the category, though there are weaker scores to come in other categories). For frequent, progress-centric reviews — stand-up meetings and the like — we’re scoring between 3 (“getting there”) and 4 (“nailing it”). But for regular reviews of end-to-end effectiveness, the typical score is a 2 (“early gains”), with a significant number of 1’s (“barely started, if at all”). Hmmm.

Yes, the daily stand-up meeting is an agile practice I would wholeheartedly recommend, particularly when it takes a form that emphasises flow over activity. But how many organisations are struggling needlessly in both their delivery and change efforts as a consequence of their neglect of higher level feedback loops?

Even if you haven’t yet embraced the Kanban Method, David’s Kanban Cadences picture serves as a very useful checklist. For each of the feedback opportunities shown, do you have a good story? In our experience, grassroots adoptions of agile methods do often deliver early benefits, but quickly reach a plateau because there is only so much that a mainly team-centric approach can achieve. The Service Delivery Review meeting in the middle of the picture is a great way to break that constraint, providing as it does a fantastic opportunity to bring together data on effectiveness and progress on change and to share it with a wider audience that may include more senior leaders, outside colleagues, and customer representatives.

I know that I’m not alone among practitioners of Kanban and Lean/Agile methods in giving high priority to those bigger-picture feedback loops, but if the survey numbers are to be believed, we must be in the minority. I’d love to help change that!