Bio

Sutap Choudhary is an Agile Coach/ a Management Consultant/ and a Change Agent. He has 15+ years of experience in consulting and have worked in various industries - Software Development, Telecom, Construction, Steel, Manufacturing and Ship Building.

In his current avatar as an Agile Coach, Sutap is helping companies undertake their Agile journey. He is also an SPC (SAFe Program Consultant) and has experience in Agile transformation at scale. Before becoming an Agile Coach, he worked as a Theory of Constraints (TOC) Consultant - helping companies complete their projects faster. Through Consultancy experience, Sutap has enjoyed the experience of working with various industries and people of different countries, diverse cultures and challenging new environments.

He has participated as a speaker at many prestigious conferences (Agile India, Lean Kanban to name a few) and also conducts Webinars on various topics. He is also a founding member of Agile Commune- a slack based agile community with members from across the world.

Session Title

Looking for Business Agility through Kanban? Beware of these pitfalls!

Session Overview

Kanban has lovers for a reason. Value stream mapping and visualization helps focus on flow and identify waste. It helps you see the full value stream, from concept to cash, and see how various entities come together to deliver value. Metrics like lead time and flow efficiency help reduce batch sizes and WIP. It also helps people come out of their siloed thinking and focus on local optimization to work towards flow optimization.

But, beware! An ill-designed Kanban can also impede flow. How? People can get attached to their columns on the board. Focus can be interpreted as doing their stuff/WIP and resisting collaborating on stuff which is not on their own plate. It can create silos leading to communication barriers. Swarming in this scenario is on need basis, and it is really not the default way of working.

In this session we will discuss: what really is a good flow? Is good flow a smooth ambling stream? or Is it a stream rushing down with lot of vigor? In the stream running down with a lot of vigor- there are uncertainties to be tackled, there are multiple views people are brainstorming on, there is rework to be handled and there is a lot of collaboration going on. Midst of all these, the team is delivering great stuff- and fast! We will discuss how to increase collaboration while being focused on your work. We will explore how to maximize the benefits of Kanban and not get bogged down by the silos it can potentially create.