Bio

Alexei Zheglov is a Canadian management consultant, specialising in the Kanban method and Enterprise Services Planning (ESP). He started his career in the 1990s as a software engineer and soon began to notice all kinds of problems modern companies run into as they try to produce and deliver complex intellectual products and professional services to their customers. He tried to “do something about it” and that gradually (by 2010) brought him to Kanban, its power in simplicity, and its pragmatism that is changing people and companies.

Over the years, Alexei has made several important contributions to Kanban and ESP, particularly around metrics and forecasting and the new field of Fitness-for-Purpose. He is a co-author, with David J Anderson, of the new book Fit-for-Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers and has another book in progress. He has also helped grow the Kanban community globally through his client work, developing many better managers, leaders, and coaches, including training India’s two very first Accredited Kanban Trainers (AKTs). Alexei is recognized as a Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) and Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT). He has served for a long time as a Program Advisor to the Lean Kanban University (LKU) coaching program. He teaches all levels of the Kanban curriculum including Kanban – the Alternative Path to Business Agility, ESP, the KCP Masterclass, and the Train-the-Trainer.

At this Lean Kanban India 2018 conference, Alexei will deliver one of the keynotes, exploring the nature of time it takes companies to deliver their products and services to customers. He will also teach a one-day pre-conference workshop on Fitness-for-Purpose and a condensed 90-minute version of it during the conference. Alexei will also team up with a leading Indian trainer to on an enhanced delivery of the two-day Kanban Management Professional (KMP II) class.

Keynote Overview

This lecture will explore only one quantity: the time it takes your company to complete some work and deliver some product or service to its customers. Also called sometimes time-to-market (for those in the audience concerned about their delivery to customers and markets) or time-in-process (if you have a process-improvement perspective) lead time is a key fitness criterion to many businesses.

First, we’ll establish the utmost importance of this time metric to your business. It’s a nearly universal fitness criterion. No matter what business you’re in, it is essential to have a delivery capability with understandable, measurable lead time.

Second, since lead time is so important, we need to explore and understand its nature well enough to derive practical recommendations to our modern businesses. This is where we must face an inconvenient truth. Significant time variability in creative, intellectual, 21st -Century work is a fact of life. Time is not a number, but a probability distribution. Therefore, to manage our work better, we need to understand its probabilistic, risk-based nature. We could, obviously, call upon some mathematical apparatus for this task, but – as the subtitle of this lecture suggests – we also have many non-mathematical, easy to understand, relatable stories and analogies to help managers grasp it.

Third, once we understand the nature of time in our modern work, we can derive practical guidance to managers on forecasting, on improving delivery of products and services to customers, on making them fitter for customers’ purpose, and on making their businesses more successful in the long term.

Workshop Overview

The Fit-for-Purpose (F4P) Framework is about how modern businesses find, satisfy and keep customers. It gives them a system to understand why their customers choose their products and services and the criteria involved in such choices.

This session will give you the essentials of the Fit-for-Purpose (F4P) Framework. First, how to break down Fit-for-Purpose into design, implementation and service delivery components. Second, how to see different market segments where customers may have different fitness criteria. Third, how to recognize different types of metrics and avoid using them for a wrong purpose, which could lead to customer dissatisfaction. Fourth, how to survey your customers to monitor and analyze the current Fit-for-Purpose of your products and services. Fifth, the most commonly occurring fitness criteria. Finally, we will outline the strategic applications and integrations of the F4P Framework.

This session is a much-shortened version of the one-day Fit-for-Purpose workshop. The workshop offers more practical takeaways and takes you through many practical exercises so that you’re ready to apply the F4P Framework in your company. However, if you cannot attend Alexei’s one-day workshop before the conference, this session will give you the F4P essentials.

Learning objectives

• Fit-for-purpose components: design, implementation, and service delivery
• Market segmentation by purpose (not demographics)
• Four types of metrics: fitness criteria – they should be your KPIs, then health indicators, improvement drivers, and everything else – vanity metrics
• How to assess fitness of your product or service using F4P Cards and F4P Box Scores
• Common fitness criteria: lead time (duration, predictability, timeliness), quality (functional, non-functional), safety and conformance
• F4P connection to strategy and integrations with several other approaches.