Setting up a Kanban system: Understanding Dissatisfaction

Setting up a Kanban system: Understanding Dissatisfaction

In today’s fast-paced work environment, optimizing processes is crucial for success. Therefore, setting up a Kanban system can help you to enhance productivity and collaboration. In this article by Dragos Dumitriu, we’ll dive into one of the key aspects of setting up your Kanban system: understanding sources of dissatisfaction. Whether you’re new to Kanban or looking to refine your approach, understanding how to effectively establish your Kanban system is the first step towards achieving greater efficiency.

Article by Dragos Dumitriu

STATIK

One of the most popular Kanban coaching tools is STATIK which stands for The Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban. As the Official Kanban Guide advises (1), it is a repeatable and humane way to get started with Kanban. To sum up, STATIK can be applied to each service or set of services delivered by an organization to optimize service delivery and the flow of value to customers.

STATIK STEPS

As a reminder, the STATIK workshop (2) comprises eight steps:  

  • Step 1: Understand what makes the service fit for purpose for the customer
  • Step 2: Understand sources of dissatisfaction with the current system
  • Step 3: Analyse demand
  • Step 4: Analyse capability
  • Step 5: Model the workflow
  • Step 6: Discover classes of service
  • Step 7: Design the Kanban system
  • Step 8: Socialize the design and facilitate implementation

In this article, we will focus on Step 2: “Understand sources of dissatisfaction with the current system”. The goal is to understand how to maximize value in our service delivery from two systemic perspectives: Internal and External.

  • The internal perspective is a summary of factors a team identifies as slowing them down, causing delays, or patterns that cause work to be blocked or put on hold.
  • The external perspective is the feedback the team receives from those to whom they deliver their services. It could be another internal team, a partner organization, or customers.

When conducting this exercise, I look for the correlation between the internal and external pain points.

Internal

For example, internally, an IT organization identified that:

  • Teams initiate new work before completing their ongoing tasks.
  • Engineers are requested to prioritize speedy delivery at the cost of adhering to agreed practices.
  • Delivery commitments are established without involving the input of the delivery team.
  • Individuals lack sufficient information to complete the tasks they have committed to.

External

Externally, their customers had strong feedback about:

  • Late or lengthy delivery times
  • Lack of quality that required rework
  • Lack of communication
  • Lack of delivery predictability.

To establish causality, understanding the correlation between the team and customer dissatisfaction sources across a value stream will help you. Then, you can build consensus around what you must address first to create the most positive impact for customers.

Why do we use STATIK?

I use this exercise to engage organizations and their customers to co-create the initial transformation approach and the motivation for change. In other words, we don’t use Kanban for the sake of Kanban. We use it to understand our customers’ pain points so we can maximize the value of our services to them.  

Hence this STATIK exercise helps organizations orient quickly to address the most important pain point or to address the greatest possible opportunity for creating better outcomes. Therefore, pick the most valuable opportunity you can solve for now. If the top one is not possible to solve right now, pick the next most valuable one you can tackle and look to create conditions to solve for the bigger one later.

Lastly, please consider making all the voices in your system heard. When you conduct STATIK, have people participate from across the whole value stream. Because there is something almost magical in every system and Kanban helps make the magic visible, tangible, and actionable:

  • Visualize the process and its constraints
  • Listen to all voices in your value stream and your systems
  • Prioritize and understand where you are going to start changing based on value to your customers.

And before you realize it, your organization might deliver 5 times more value and 5 times faster.

Download “The Official Kanban Guide” from the Kanban University webpage or from Kanban+ (available with free account). 

Download STATIK materials for free from Kanban+:

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