Measurement lives within management

I promised in my first post here on tumblr that I’d explain how to to make teams adopt managerial terms such as lead-cycle time, cumulative flow diagrams, value diagrams, etc. In this second post I’ll tell you how I bust the myth of “measurement lives within management”.

To minimize the learning curve of adopting new process tools, such as Kanban, I make use of games in particular Kanban Pizza game Kanban Software games. Both games introduce various concepts of Kanban and exposes the importance of measurements. 

The two games as a set of lowest comon denominators:

• They both use rounds
• They are time based
• They calculate a certain business value

To support this, I’ve created a data poster where each team notes the details after each round (e.g. production time, business value, inventory, etc.). In addition, I’ve printed 3 empty grids posters which are used for business value diagrams, cumulative flow diagrams and lead-cycle time diagrams.

After each round the team does a short data collection and retrospective following this agenda:

1. Collect and store data on the data poster
2. Update business value diagram with data from data poster
3. Update lead-cycle diagram with data from data poster
4. Update cumulative flow diagram with data from data poster
5. Take a minute or two to discuss good/bad from last round
6. Review the diagrams and see if the good/bad from step 5 is noticeable in the diagram

The benefit of using the described agenda is that the team adopts the data and diagrams (and hopefully) realise the benefit of keeping the data up to date. For instance, you’ll observe that people start to explain behaviour within the team or reasons for delays by pointing and discussing infront of the diagrams.