Flight Levels of Kanban (Klaus Leopold)

What is Kanban?

Principles

1. Start with what you do now.
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change.
3. Initially, respect current processes, roles, responsibilities and job titles.
4. Encourage leadership on all levels in the organizations.

Practices

1. Make work visible.
2. Limit work in progress (WIP).
3. Manage flow.
4. Make process policies explicit.
5. Implement feedback mechanisms.
6. Improve collaboratively (using models).

Kanban Flight Levels?

KANBAN IS NOT AN AGILE METHOD……..companies improve their agility with Kanban.

KANBAN DOES NOT FOCUS ON TEAMS…can be applied on team-level.

Flight levels is a communication tool:

• shows the possibilities you have with Kanban
• can be used to clarify where to start with Kanban

Flight Level 1

Team / Department. Organizational unit, uncoordinated input. Main characteristics:

• Team or department level.
• input is not coordinated.
• push from outside.
• a lot of work on the table.

Advantages:

• Simple start, “Guerrilla Kanban”.
• improved visibility & communication.
• focus on finishing work.
• improved team efficiency.

Disadvantages:

• working on the wrong things.
• imbalance of demand and capability.
• many expedite requests.
• a lot of re-prioritization.

Flight Level 2

Team/Department. Organizational unit with coordinated input.

Main characteristics:

• Team or deparment level.
• Input is coordinated.
• Pull from the outside/upstream.
• Modern change management required.

Advantages

• Demand and capability is being balanced.
• Working on the right things more efficiently.
• Less re-prioritization, less expedite work.

Disadvantages

• Local optimization.

Flight level 3: value stream.

Main characteristics:

• Optimization of (parts of) the value stream.
• (More) global optimization.
• Pull across the value stream.
• Modern change managemetn required.

Advantages

• Optimization of the interaction of teams/departments.
• Doing the right thing at the right time.
• Significant reduction of queue sizes.
• Balancing demand VS capability across the value stream.

Disadvantages

• Often focus on project goals only.

Flight Level 4. Portfolio

Main characteristics:

• Optimization of portfolio.
• Multi-project, multi-customer, risk decisions.
• More stop-and-go than flow.
• Often quite easy to start with.

Advantages

• Making conscious business decisions about projects / customers.
• Focus on business goals and not on project goals.
• Stop starting, start finishing of projects.

The flight levels modal….

• Is a communication tool.
• Shows what’s possible with Kanban.
• Helps to clarify where to start with Kanban.

Flight levels is NOT a maturity model

• Kanban practices on flight level 1 could be deeper than on flight level 3
• Flight level 1: organizational unit, uncoordinated input.
• Flight level 2: organizational unit, coordinated input.
• Flight level 3: value stream.
• Flight level 4: portflolio.