This is a story of a large physical engineering company transitioning from traditional project management practices to the Kanban method whilst maintaining safety and increasing the reliability of the equipment in their care. What was different about this delivery was having the equipment located in the ocean hundreds of miles from land.
The company had been suffering from their product going off-line and numerous failures known as ‘trips’.
In this story, you will discover how the team and organisation introduced the Kanban Method to:
- Visualise their work both on and offshore
- Reveal what was stopping the execution of valuable and expensive engineering work
- See for the first time just how much engineering effort went nowhere
- Establish a direct connection between the organisation’s strategic objectives and everything delivered using Kanban flight levels
- Pivot with ease when the parent organisation decided to introduce multi-disciplinary teams
- Cultivate a habit of experimentation and continuous improvement
The result was a reduction in the time taken to deliver engineering by up to 50% in some cases, the removal of around 80% of the requests that would never have been delivered in the past (failure demand) and fewer instances of the product going off-line.
This all equated to an acceleration in the rate at which change was delivered and the accompanying improvement in product maintenance.
Learning Outcomes:
Leaving this session, the learner will be able to:
- Sketch out a situation using a causal loop diagram
- Explain each of the different Kanban flight levels and where to apply them
- Design the conditions for team ownership of their process without reliance on a coach
