How Kanban can help Delivery Leaders
Understand your service capability
Many delivery leaders want to be able to deliver a reliable, repeatable service, but yet they don’t understand their delivery capability. Do you know the capability of your service group/team for each of their work types? Do you think you could give a reliable / repeatable commitment based on their capability? If not, Kanban can help you get to understand the nature of each of the types of work in your system and your service group / team’s ability to provide it. This give you the foundation for reliable, repeatable delivery.
Meet stakeholder expectations
Most delivery leaders have to balance different expectations from various stakeholders. Have you ever experienced demanding stakeholders putting pressure on you to make sure you deliver to expectations? It can be hard to meet expectations without Kanban because your system of work would be unpredictable. Learn how to stablise your work system and make it predictable so you can reliably and repeatedly keep commitments to your stakeholders.
Balance competing risks
Most delivery leaders don’t actually spend much time doing this – but this is really where you should be spending your time. Can you balance competing risks – being able to defer certain options and committing early to others. Do you know how to make these decisions and do you have a way of justifying these to your stakeholders in an open and transparent way? Learn to manage like a leader with Kanban as your service group’s maturity improves, you can balance various competing risks.
