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

When and how should I extend flow throughout my organization?
Achieving flow at the local level with teams and departments can produce significant improvements in service delivery. But does this make your organization fit for purpose? In this talk we examine the limits of local flow and the need to achieve flow throughout your entire organization.
LoyaltyOne /Air Miles (LO) is a Canadian-based retail focused marketing company employing over 1000 employees.

Pea Pods!
Over the past several years working on improving service delivery at LO we began to notice converging delivery patterns across all technology initiatives that took on pea-pod shaped CFDs with predictable 5 to 7 month lead times. This stability in delivery pattern occurs regardless of technology, domain, or teams involved. While this represented significant improvement for the company, a significant gap still remained between this capability and our fit service delivery thresholds.

In this session, we discuss how we examined our entire delivery approach from a Systems Thinking lens; through the exploration of causal loop relationship we reveal the limits of localized flow. We share how this examination has lead us to better understand our upstream flow. We identify overburdening at a company-wide level, with disconnected downstream commitment points that result in push systems. We also explore how this results in work fragmentation that clouds customer recognizability of product features and disconnects local improvements from fit for purpose thresholds.