STATIK - System Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban for Research & Design
Kanban has been around since early 1940, thanks to Japan’s Toyota automotive. Chances are you are leveraging Kanban in one level or another. I’ve found in my experiences, though, that mature Kanban design that considers research, service design or experience design practices to the lacking. Sure we can deliver some software, but what about the exploratory, generative phases of strategy? Or the Formative insights to prioritisation? This is a three-part workshop series tailored to support Kanban design for those very crafts, elevating design in your business to inform strategic decisions with confidence with a human-centred design lens. However, it’s not as simple as designing some gates and swimlanes. Mature Kanban design that enables a flow through the navigation of early ambiguity to delivery confidence takes much consideration. Luckily we have STATIK (System Thinking approach to Introduce Kanban).
STATIK is an exploratory approach to implement Kanban leveraging System Thinking, or more specifically, the 6 principles of system thinking:
Wholeness and Interaction - The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (the property of the total, not the property of the parts; The product of interactions, not the sum of actions of the parts)
Openness - Living systems can only be understood in the context of their environment.
Patterns - To identify uniformity or similarity in multiple entities or numerous times.
Purposefulness - What you know about how they do what they do leads to understanding why they do what they do.
Multidimensionality - To see complementary relations in opposing tendencies and create feasible wholes with infeasible parts.
Counterintuitive - Actions intended to produce the desired outcome may generate opposite results.
We will leverage these principles along with Kanban principles through a series of three detailed workshops that will help you understand your teams current demands and dynamics, informing the design of your workflows that will result in more efficient and effective delivery, whilst providing a platform to forever continuously optimise.
Let's break down the workshop for you
Your Values, Principles & Mission
Sources of dissatisfaction
Analyze the source and nature
Define Work-types, Classes of Service (CoS)
Model the service delivery workflow aka Definition of Done’s (DoD) and Relative Job Sizes
Design Kanban System
Socialize design & negotiate implementation
Analyze current delivery capability
Want the TL;DR? Sure, see below both a Figjam or Miro board you can download and leverage for your workshops. If Kanban is new to you, though, I suggest reading to gain context to these boards.
Figjam - STATIK template
A Figjam board to help facilitate a series of STATIK workshops, resulting in your Kanban design.
Miro - STATIK template
A Miro board to help facilitate a series of STATIK workshops, resulting in your Kanban design.
Workshop Agenda
Total Time:
360min (not including the assumed socialising of your Kanban design and implementation negotiation)
Attendees:
Really depends on your organisations ways of working, decentralised, vs federated, design buy in etc.
Note: You can see Figjam and Miro template with supporting instructions available at the bottom of this article.
First Session - 120min
1. Your Values, Principles & Mission
05min
Introduction setting the scene
Provide context to the workshop. This will be the first workshop of a series in front of you to continue optimising your ways of working, notably in relation to design and research in cross-functional environments.
For example:
You could introduce the ‘Core Principles of Kanban’ as guiding principles for the workshop's future outputs.
Start With What You Do Now
Agree to Pursue Incremental, Evolutionary Change
Respect the Current Process, Roles & Responsibilities
Encourage Acts of Leadership at All Levels
And/Or the ‘Five core practices of Kanban’
Visualise workflow
Limit work in progress
Measure and manage the flow
Make process policies explicit
Use models to recognise improvement opportunities
05min
Walk-thru the ‘Why’
Efficiency and effectiveness mean nothing without understanding your purpose of being, the mission you're here to complete. Working towards your mission without clear principles can result in a chaos of inefficiencies and sunk cost. And lastly, the mindset of values you amplify and exude across your environments ensure principles are upheld missions are realised all within awesome cultural environments.
You may very well have existing values, principles and mission. If so, fantastic! Ensure you leverage them and either evolve or align them to your STATIK series of workshops.
Ensure also to consider adjacent teams to encourage siloed ways of working. If you have a wider team, program, portfolio, or company missions, principles and values, leverage them and build continuity with them cascading your own. There's to collaborate through the full stack of your environments.
15min
Your specialist capability UVP (unique value proposition)
Pending the size of your workshop, break out into smaller teams of approx. 4-7 per group. Provide them with a template:
05min
Values - Ask yourself what mindsets and behaviours you expect from your colleagues? Why are these important to you and the team?
05min
Principles - Are their explicit ways of working must be upheld? Some examples include:
Eliminate bias with rigour accuracy in all design research tests
Align to or evolve the design system over-designed siloed artefacts
Design with inclusive considerations for our accessible audiences
05min
Mission - What’s the result of your involvement? What value have you realised when? The mission is complete?
Debate across these three domains, build affinity where possible, dot vote and collate the highest sum items.
Note: Values, principles, and mission completed obviously take longer than a 30min to define. The conversation and alignment here is valuable element.
If you’re interested in going deeper on this subject, I have another workshop article you can see here:
Leveraging Objective Goals Strategic & Measure (OGSM) to define your Vision, Values, Principles & Mission
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
15min
Your UVP Elevator Pitch
Leveraging your Vision, Principles and Mission voted affinities, continue with your breakout groups and provide them with this elevator pitch template:
As <who we are >
We Provide <what we do >
For <client>
In Order to <reason the client comes to us >
Facilitator: The group's breakout collates the Values, Principles and Mission into a team statement from the highest sum votes.
05min
Define your statement - In your breakout groups, note the first thing that comes to mind for each statement blank.
05min
Bring it together - Bring all of your breakout elevator pitch statements together, build affinity where possible, dot vote and collate the highest sum items.
Note: Provide individuals 7-11 votes for each data point. You must have enough measures to build some relative between your voted domains.
05min
Playback - Playback your collated values, principles and mission, as well as elevator pitch with the workshop group.
Congratulate the attendees on the first stage of their STATIK journey! And introduce them to the next set of agenda items, ' Sources of dissatisfaction'.
2. Sources of dissatisfaction
Note: If you have experience facilitating or building a value exchange systems map, I would suggest that as the best facilitator tool to leverage in this next section of the workshop. If you don’t have experience with value exchange systems mapping, not to worry! The next phase of the workshop can be easily continued without it.
If you’re interested in going deeper on system mapping, I suggest checking out kudu.io. I also have another ‘how to’ article you can see here.
Tools for Systems Thinkers: Systems Mapping
This is where systems mapping tools come in — they provide an exploration of the system…
25min
Sources of dissatisfaction
05min
Who’s who in the zoo? Break out into your smaller groups again, start detailing your immediate sphere of influence initially. Who do you exchange value with? (e.g. Research provides insight to the Product Owner, Designer provides experiences BA’s, Developers provide scenarios for Testers etc.) Refrain from reaching too wide initially. Work through each layer of influence like a babushka doll, starting with your immediate team, working towards executives, considering cross-sections of Communities of Practices (COP).
10min
Type of value exchange - Start detailing types of value exchanges that exist between all parties in the zoo (e.g. as “internal” (we perceive) or external (clients or stakeholders perceive).
Note: If you find little ‘external’ exchanges, your team is likely working in an immature, siloed manner. Challenge them to why and build some healthy friction to uncover more truth.
10min
Detail the pains and gains - Whilst detailing your sources of dissatisfaction, consider both the roles and groups identified in the zoo swell as the type of value exchange (e.g., you may not have a great relationship with an Executive, but your ways of working aren’t necessarily impacted. Versus, you may have a great relationship with a Tester, but your exchange of value illustrates ineffective ways of working.
Consider these through a Pains & Gains lens of getting the job done:
Gains – benefits the customer expects, desires or would be surprised by (e.g. Wants)
Pains – negative emotions, undesired costs or situations, and risks the customer (could) experience before, during, or after getting the job done. (e.g. Needs)
05min
Playback
Ask each breakout team to select a champion to present their outputs to the broader audience. If you have the time, coffee is very likely needed by now…
3. Analyse the source and nature of demand
Note: This next section will reflect some chicken and egg scenarios. To properly synthesise the demand, we need to understand our work types and team specialist capabilities. However, true too divergent, convergent thinking, I’ve found it helps to start with some discovery of sources and nature of demand detailing initially, analyse them to inform ‘work types’ (e.g. user-testing). And utilising both data sets to your classes of service (COS) later.
10min
Sources of source of demand
05min
Leveraging our Kanban principle “Start with what you do now” - Start detailing what work in process (WIP) now. If you have an existing board, fantastic, use it. If you have the time, describe other examples of work types that are common to your workshop participants.
05min
Where has demand come from? - Of each WIP detail, where the demand for the work originates from (e.g. who’s asking for it and who needs it?). Remember to reference your value exchange map created previously in the workshop.
05min
Nature of demands
05min
What’s the nature of your WIP demand? - Were they expected and planned with an appropriate lead time to deliver? Or were they random requests that needed to be expedited? How often are these work types required? Is there a common job size for these WIP?
15min
Playback Sources of source of demand & Nature of demands
05min
Align to Value Exchange Map - Align the natures of demand to your value exchange systems map to inform it with your further details.
05min
Playback - Ask each breakout team to select a champion to present their outputs to the broader audience.
05min
Vote - Ask each attendee to dot vote on any of the maps created against the sources of dissatisfaction and nature of demands detailed. You should now start seeing a pattern of opportunities in your system that can be optimised with further work type definition and Kanban design.
Note: Again, provide individuals 7-11 votes for each data point. You must have enough measures to build some relative between your voted domains.
Assuming you' have booked 2 hours for the first workshop, you should have 15min buffer.
Second Session - 120min
4. Define Work-types & Classes of Service (CoS)
Your Classes of Service (CoS) will enable you to define different work items according to their typical priority levels. Some examples of CoS are Work Item Type(s), Cost of Delay, Projects, Retainers, OKRs. As a scenario example, you may have a new flagship proposition offering. You know this will have an impact on your information architecture. Find-ability of your unique proposition is critical, yet ensuring you don’t cannibalise existing product and service conversions is equally essential. Information architecture could be defined as a work type that includes activities like card-sorting and tree-testing. Considering the lead time required for information architecture design, determining the priority early will be critical to ensuring you aren’t expediting quick fixes to poorly converting rushed implementation. This is where Cost of Delay Profiles come to support.
Cost of Delay (CoD) is the perceived economic value of a work items through time. It helps teams understand how the value of an item they are working on can diminish over time.
Common CoD profiles I’m sure would be familiar to you include:
Expedite
Do it yesterday, we are losing a lot of money
Standard
Usual cadence to get it done soon as possible
Fixed date
Campaigns, regs or agreements
Intangible
You know it’s going to be expedited soon…
See further definition of the Cost of Delay here: Cost of Delay the Economic Impact of a Delay in Project Delivery
10min
Playback Previous Session
You’ve worked through a lot of context in your previous session. Take your time to properly digest it. Personally, I find it best to provide a good 5min of personal time to reflect and another 5min to play back shared understandings.
05min
Introduction setting the scene
Remember to note your ‘sources and nature of demand’ - in the previous workshop. For example, Proposition teams may consistently ask for rapid conceptual validation, BAs and Engineers will ask for design specs, Strategy may require field studies or vision narratives, etc.
20min
Identify Work-types
05min
Your specialist skills - Detail the types of work your team conduct, think research and validation, strategy, design, optimisation, etc.
10min
Loop it whilst considering phases of work types - Research and Design work through the whole gamut of chaotic ambiguity to inform strategic decisions, deliver core product and service officers, and continuous optimisation. Plant these seeds whilst the team are to start identifying their work types.
05min
Affinity mapping - Starting building affinities resulting in the beginnings of your defined work types.
05min - Optional
Work-type pain points - Often, some work types can be hard to complete (e.g. no procurement of supporting software, unrealistic lead-time for the work type, etc.).
10min
Associate to Cost of Delay Profiles
05min
Reflect on previous examples of differing priorities - as mentioned previously with CoD profile examples, ask your team to detail scenarios of previous initiative demands with context.
10min
Ask your teams to ideate on your rules of engagement - for each identified profile (e.g. standard priorities are expected to be released by a program or team prioritisation session, or fixed date profiles require retainer or contractor partners to support, etc.) What policies, procedures, partners, or workflows will you need to support flow of your team?
“Make process policies explicit.”
10min
Playback
Ask each breakout team to select a champion to present their outputs to the broader audience.
☕ Time to get coffee… the next session gets deep and needs detailed thinking.
Homework - synthesis of a consolidated view of all the breakout team work-type and CoD profile affinity maps.
5. Model the service delivery workflow aka Definition of Done’s (DoD) and Relative Job Sizes
Modelling the service delivery workflow is the next section usually, but I find working through your DoD of work-types is a more tangible way to get there. By detailing your work types DoD, the boundaries of your services, stakeholders, customers, and dependencies throughout your workflows become evident. So rather than modelling workflows for every kind of demand, I recommend taking the two smaller steps below with workflows in mind. You will derive a more detailed outcome whilst still the core elements you need to design your Kanban system. If the complex is a tree and complicated is a watch, we’re talking about a watch engineer mindset for this next section. Take it slow, do it right to tell the time right.
30min
Definition of Done to identified
Work-types
Personally, if you chase only the result, your rigour in methods and approach lapse, your results become a point in time rather than a sustainably confident flow of results. So let’s define some severity in your approach to work-types with definitions of done.
05min
Prioritise your work-types - stack ranks your work-types by the frequency your team performs team. Followed by work-types your team doesn’t perform but know need to dedicate more time and effort towards the future.
20min
Utilise your close work-type affinities - and from start to finish, logic gate your workflow from inception to fruition.
What tooling do you need to leverage, and how?
What values, principles, or guidelines must you abide by?
Who needs to be involved in check-ins and sign-offs?
What does receiving parties require?
Who needs to be socialised or aligned on learnings?
05min
Practice real-world scenarios - utilise your natures of demand scenarios and walk through your examples of definition of done modelled. Take a moment to identify opportunities to enable your definition of done to reduce the administrative overhead of checks and balances (e.g. see the Figma Design Checklist below as a tremendous micro example).
Figma Design Checklist
Design handoff checklist created through blood, sweat, and pixels.
05min
Associate relative sizing
Obviously, pending the context, your efforts can differ. But with the premise of trying to keep your job size as minor as possible, we now want to associate some relative sizing to your job types as a preliminary indicator.
The word relative here is significant! Agilists will usually use Fibonacci because it's excellent at modelling relativity against an exponential graph (e.g. 1 is close to 2, 21 has a more extensive delineation to 34, etc.). But I've found people tend to get fixated on the ''numbers'' trying to associate them to time rather than relativity. So if it helps use t-shirt sizes, or furniture, or dogs, it really doesn't matter along as there is a precise measure of relativity in size between each delineator.
05min
Relatively size your work types - based on the effort required to realise your defined DoD. As a result, you should have the beginnings of a toolkit of work-types of small > large degrees of action that you can leverage for future efforts.
10min
Playback DoD and Sizing
05min
Align to a consolidated Work-type view - Align all your DoD and presumed relative sizing of work-types together to a mater view of all the breakout teams.
05min
Playback - Ask each breakout team to select a champion to present their outputs to the broader audience.
Homework - synthesis of a consolidated view of all the breakout team DoD and relative sizing estimates.
Assuming you' have booked 2 hours for the first workshop, you should have 15min buffer.
Third Session - 120min
6. Design Kanban System
Congratulations for making it this far! You now have all the ingratiates necessary to begin designing your Kanban system. Very exciting! And in my personal opinion, this is the fun part.
10min
Playback Previous Session
Again you’ve worked through a lot of context in your previous session. Take your time to properly digest it. And again, personally, I find it best to provide a good 5min of personal time to reflect and another 5min to play back shared understandings.
05min
Introduction setting the scene
Time to reiterate the ‘Core Principles of Kanban’ and ‘Five core practices of Kanban’ to the team.
Gather all previous workshop outputs you have derived and synthesised, including:
Value exchange map
Sources and natures of demand
Identify Work-types
Definition of Done
Associate relative sizing
Associate to Cost of Delay Profiles
05min
Playback - all the above-consolidated definitions of your previous workshops. Provide them with the space to design their very own Kanban’s.
In the next section of the agenda, you will start defining your primary delivery phases. Each organisation is set up differently with org structures or craft accountabilities, but assuming your organisation leverages research and design to inform strategic business decisions confidently. Please keep front of mind two key concepts.
Research Funnel
Exploratory research to understanding a domain, e.g. (field studies of customer segments or new markets)
Generative research to identify opportunities validating new hypotheses to further define the domain. e.g.(aligning with the business of early business models and value propositions)
Formative research to begin informing delivery with a variability of solutions. e.g.(moderated user testing of conceptual delivery options)
Summative research to validate solution intent against your success metrics. e.g. (unmoderated user testing to inform sprint planning prioritisation with confidence)
Set-based Design
A practice to keep requirements and design options as flexible as possible for as long as possible during your development process. Providing variation in solution options instead of a single point solution upfront. By exploring multiple possibilities, you gain faster, more frequent learning loops, resulting in the elimination of poorer choices sooner, whilst enhancing the flexibility in the design process by not committing to a thin technical slice unless validated as the appropriate solution or direction.
10min
Primary Phases of Delivery
05min
Starting with primary phases of delivery - your macro phases of delivery (e.g. discovery, ideation, definition, delivery, optimisation) Most will likely reference the double diamond here, but remember this is your environment with your context and scenarios for design and research.
As your teams, what delineates a primary phase? Is it related to how funding is released? Or which teams or departments are involved? Or your level of ambiguity or knowledge of space?
05min
In and out gate criteria - what needs to be ready for the gate to open in readiness for the subsequent phases? Conversely, what needs to be completed for your primary phases to be considered ‘done’.
30min
Design Kanban Breakout
15min
Design your stages per each of the primary phases detailed - ‘To Do, In Progress, Done’ are states of a ticket, not your stages in delivery!
05min
Do your stages ‘Visualise your work’? - In Research and Design, the is always a significant effort recruiting cohorts to test with, synthesising insights, prototyping before designing. Do your stages reflect the workflows behind your work? Take the time to ensure your workflow isn’t hidden behind a workflow ticket but instead presents excellent transparency of the flow your team is working within.
05min
Remember, we want to be ‘explicated in our policies’ - ensure your gates reflect the required checks and balances needed to provide confidence with quality throughput whilst empowering the teams to deliver with collaborative autonomy.
05min
In and out gate criteria again - what needs to be ready for the gate to open in readiness for the next stage? Conversely, what needs to be completed for your defined stages to be considered ‘done’.
05min
Playback Kanban Design Breakout
05min
Playback & Vote - Ask each breakout team to select a champion to present back their outputs to the broader audience. Ask each attendee to dot vote on any of the kanban systems designed. You should now start seeing a pattern of opportunities in your system that can be optimised with further work type definition and kanban design.
30min
Design Kanban Breakout
10min
Take in the playbacks and votings - to optimise your Kanban design.
20min
Run through examples of previous engagements - does your Kanban enable the flow of work to your designed workflow? Stress-test your Kanban against your classes of service. Does it cater to the variation in work priorities for your team? Does it support engagements large and small in nature?
10min
Playback Kanban Design Breakout & Vote
Ask each breakout team to select a champion to present their outputs to the broader audience. Be explicit with sharing why you designed the Kanban the way you have.
Finally, ask your attendees to vote on their favourite Kanban.
If you have decided to implement Kanban in your team or your organization, this series of posts could help you on that journey.
Research Skills Framework · "RSF" is a pattern language for research practice, with a set of tools for researchers and their teams to learn, work, and grow.
Enabling and streamlining product design’s best practices is one of DesignOps’ critical tasks. But to outline workflows that embed best practices…
Boom! Congratulations on completing two heavy workshops!
Don't worry about getting it right the first time. See your first implementation as a learning opportunity and continue refining it forever. My final two suggestions:
Leverage your Kanban to promote your ways of working, socialise and amplify it to all parties you have identified in your needs and demand section.
Don't underestimate the effort required to reflect your Kanban digitally in whatever project management software you use (Jira FTW 😉, Rally please don't 🙈, Trello… you can do better. I use it for my groceries list 🍎, not software development…). That isn't to say you can't start with a physical board with your trusty painter's tape and system cards, but #covid has made that unfortunately difficult…
I hope you enjoyed the workshop series and find your team's flow! Remember, "In the new world, it is not the big fish that eats the small fish, it's the fast fish that eats the slow fish" - Klaus Schwab.
