Feeling like your teams are always overloaded and every effort seems to be the highest priority? Upper management does not understand why progress appears slow on project X, while the business teams do not understand why progress appears slow on project Y. External vendors indicate costs are going up due to delays in project Z. You cannot win, eh?
An approach that may help could be explained as “a picture is worth a thousand words”. This approach is a combination of Kanban project management and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This approach isn’t quite that simple since it does minimally require a level of analysis of the organization.
Starting with the five stages with ITIL:
- Service Strategy
- Service Design
- Service Transition
- Service Operation
- Continual Service Improvement
Kanban uses visual boards to help teams plan, schedule and track work. Combining ITIL and Kanban is the first step; understanding how to reduce the stress of multiple high-priority efforts is the next step. The analysis component is important as it requires knowledge of the throughput of each stage; Kanban references this as Work-In-Progress (WIP) limits. As an example, if the Service Design had three architects to create a workable application design based on information in Service Strategy, one might project they are able to work on three designs simultaneously. Giving them more than three projects from the Service Strategy is meaningless as you already understand the WIP limits. The Service Design owner is the gatekeeper for the number of projects in progress at that stage. The other stages also have an owner acting in a similar manner. Is that all? Not quite. The additional power given to each stage’s owner is that they can also send a project back to a prior stage if it is lacking information. Also, if necessary, the project can get pushed back to another prior stage as appropriate, assuming vital information is missing.
How does that help with the business teams? A few ways that I have seen:
- A regular meeting that uses the Kanban approach of visual boards and cards can show a project’s status, whether it is progressing further or being sent back for additional information.
- The visual boards convey to the business teams/stakeholders the overall throughput capacity. So, if analysis reveals a maximum of 10 projects can exist at different stages within ITIL, adding an 11th project means some prior project must be removed. The visual will allow the business teams to make that decision rather than IT.
- Visual boards also allow the ITIL (stage) owners the knowledge/power to know when to pull a project from a prior step. Considering Service Design, there could be several projects where the design is complete. They cannot be pushed to Service Transition (ST) until ST’s owner can start work on them. This also reveals where additional staffing is needed (short or long-term).
Will combining these two approaches help with your stress of deciding which project has the highest priority? I have seen it work. Implementing this will require buy-in and may need some modifications for your organization, but it can work.
Dan Kempton is the Sr. IT Advisor at North Carolina Department of Information Technology. An accomplished IT executive with over 35 years of experience, Dan has worked nearly equally in the private sector, including startups and mid-to-large scale companies, and the public sector. His Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science fuel his curiosity about adopting and incorporating technology to reach business goals. His experience spans various technical areas including system architecture and applications. He has served on multiple technology advisory boards, ANSI committees, and he is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Industrial & Systems Engineering school at NC State University. He reports directly to the CIO for North Carolina, providing technical insight and guidance on how emerging technologies could address the state’s challenges.
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