Kanban Week 2018: Lean Kanban North America / Kanban Leadership Retreat

In this session, I am going to tell the story of the Kanban transition in a German private bank that happened as part of a wider SAFe initiative, spanning more than 1.5 years.

The transition took place in the IT Operations department, consisting of appr. 80 people in 8 teams that provide the IT services backbone for about 800 employees and the partners of the bank.

The story has different interesting facets, like the coaching approaches for implementing systems, the power of Proto-Kanban, and dealing with the effects of a managed change towards SAFe while pursuing evolutionary change. It involves both Kanban systems at team level but also on Portfolio Level for overarching initiatives.

I will describe the insights and learnings that the organization had, and how these were applied. From a bit of distance, I will also reflect on the initiative from a Kanban Coaching stance, with particular focus on how the SAFe context impacted the work.