The Agile Executive

The topic Socializing Agile with Your Executives has been a major thread in this blog. A convenient to browse compilation of posts on the subject can be found in the Starting Agile category. In particular, two recent posts – The Business Value of Agile Software Methods and It Won’t Work Here – are quite specific on the data to use and the line of reasoning to follow in such discussions.

When it comes to socializing Kanban with your executives, you might choose to start the conversation by looking at the defect tracking system your company is using. Chances are your executive will “discover” the all important aspect of flow simply by examining the system with respect to some natural questions such as:

• Have more defects been closed than opened over the past month?
• What is the average time to close a reported defect?
• How many defects have been open (in one stage or another) in the system for more than a year?
• When a defect moves from one stage in the system to another, how does it get aligned with the various activities that need to take place in the release management system?
• If development and QA were to stop everything they do and just work exclusively on closing defects that have already been captured, could they clean slate in six months?

The power of this straightforward approach lies in the ease of making the mental jump from defect to Kanban in the context of the tracking system. The breaking down of an epic or a story to granular components that can be pushed to members of the Agile team is not always an easy concept to grasp (and often times a technique teams struggle with in the initial phases of an Agile roll-out). In contrast, one can simply visualize defects entered into the tracking system as inputs to a de-facto Kanban system. Obviously, the defect/Kanban maintains its identity as it “flows” through the system all the way from being reported by a customer to communication of its resolution to the customer. 

If your defect tracking system does not easily lend itself to answering the questions listed above, you might try one of the public domain data sets from Mining Software Archives. The specific data, of course is not likely to be applicable to your company. The criticality of flow, however, could probably be demonstrated by making a few fairly straightforward assumptions on the operating environment behind the data.