Lean-Kanban in the enterprise
At a Financial Services Company (FSC), a critical onboarding team couldn’t keep up with demand and was being bombarded with complaints from Sales. By visualizing flow and limiting work in progress, we cut cycle time by roughly 80%, and turned the team’s harshest critics into its champions.
Fortune 500 companies are, in many ways, the most successful firms in our economy. Getting there isn’t easy, but if you do things right, you ship a slew of products, attract a lot of customers, and have to hire and keep a strong base of technologists to serve their growing needs. That same period of growth is where the pains that come with success tend to surface.
The FSC saw these pains in one critical product development team (the Team) responsible for the infrastructure to onboard new customers. The Team couldn’t keep up with rising demand, and FSC’s customers were stuck with a slow, unfriendly onboarding process. Several of them threatened to cancel newly signed deals. Both Product and Technical leadership fielded complaints from the FSC Sales team almost daily.
Natoma Consulting conducted a preliminary analysis of the Team’s flow and discovered that even though the number of clients being onboarded was approximately half of what it was the previous year, the average time it took to complete an onboarding had doubled.
The paradox we found
- Clients being onboarded: ~half of the prior year
- Average time to onboard: Doubled
This made diagnosing the root cause of the delay less obvious. Since the Team’s composition was the same as the prior year and the number of onboards dropped, resolution time was expected to drop as well. Working with developers, team leads, and leadership, we quickly uncovered that the backlog was growing exponentially with onboarding requests from Sales, along with a variety of other requested work from other groups. As a result, many work items were being tackled simultaneously in an attempt to get everything done sooner. It became clear that the Team could benefit from applied Lean and Kanban principles to visualize and optimize flow and reduce work in progress. So we crafted a phased approach to ensure proper adoption.
Phase 1: Visualize the flow
The Team focused on visualizing the flow. We tuned Jira and other tools to help them manage the backlog and work better together. With that in place, the Team could study their cumulative flow diagrams and see how much time work items spent in each development stage. The main driver of long onboarding times was the wait (lead) time: a backlog of onboarding requests piled up, and the Team took a while to get through it before Sales resorted to escalation.
Phase 2: Limit work, and experiment
We coached the Team to limit the amount of work they were executing, to focus on catching up to the backlog, and to find sustainable ways to reduce cycle time. In this phase we introduced systemic continuous-improvement mechanisms, kaizen, and experimented extensively to achieve those goals.
We believe experimentation drives successful agile adoptions. Feedback loops have to be short too, so teams can try and fail (and learn) fast. Working closely with the Team, we searched for the work-in-progress limits that would let them complete onboarding requests on time while keeping the growing backlog in check. These experiments pushed overall cycle time temporarily up. That may seem counterintuitive, but it’s normal during an agile adoption. Teams have to “go slow to go fast,” unlearning sub-optimal behaviors before replacing them with better practices.
Phase 3: Build tools, delegate, and scale
After a few iterations, the Team and leadership landed on tested, durable solutions that raised their performance. They built automated tools and trained the Sales team to use them to onboard new clients themselves. That reduced, and in some cases removed, FSC’s dependence on the Team to onboard new clients.
They were able to turn that perception around and build tools that handed control to the people the delays hurt most, who then went on to become champions for the Team themselves.
These solutions optimized flow and reduced cycle time by approximately 80% compared to Phase 1. Sales and customer complaints, and escalations to leadership, dropped sharply. The Team was happier, too, because they were no longer the “bad guys” who got in the way of success. A downward cycle had become a virtuous one.
Throughout the three phases, our four-principle approach to agile adoptions was instrumental to making this a sustainable success. We took the time to train and educate everyone involved, including leadership; promoted tested processes and optimized them to reflect the Team’s needs and context; introduced new technologies to ease visualization and metrics-gathering; and made sure quality was built into the processes used, by promoting practices such as continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), and pair programming.
The solutions we crafted in partnership with the FSC were made to last. Coupled with a new but strong culture of continuous improvement, the Team became one of the best-performing groups and are on their way to being a positive role model to others at the company. We look forward to seeing how these successes inspire others to be agile rather than do agile.