Fernando Cuenca started as a developer in the early 90s (C++ used to be his best friend), discovered Extreme Programming in the early 2000s, carried the “dev manager” title for a brief period, and became a full time Delivery Coach by 2009. By 2015, he felt usual "agile transformation" strategies left many unanswered questions, and found many of the answers in the Kanban Method. As an Accredited Kanban Consultant and Trainer, his focus then switched to helping leadership “above the team” to better manage the end-to-end flow of work in ways that yield better, systemic results. In 2018, he co-founded SquirrelNorth, a global consulting firm based out of Toronto, Canada, that applies a multitude of Management, Agile and Lean disciplines in conjunction with industry-leading expertise in the Kanban Method to pragmatically improve the business performance of its clients.

Agile Dependency Management: When "going cross-functional" is not the answer

It is unlikely that the road that goes from "Customer need" to "Customer need fulfilled" will traverse a single team or service; more often than not, managing end-to-end flow will require the orchestration of various teams and groups. If you're part of a team, chances are that at some point or another you will need the help of other groups in the organization. All these dependencies introduce delays and uncertainty, and are common sources of dissatisfaction for managers and team members alike. A common prescription to solve dependency problems is the reorganization into "cross-functional teams", and while this is certainly a concept that has merits and has gained lots of traction in the last decade, it also generates significant push back from some organizations and their leaders. In this talk, I will argue that there are very practical limits to cross-functionality which make this kind of reorganization not possible (or even desirable) in many business situations, and that as a result of that dependencies "are here to stay", suggesting that effective techniques for dependency management may be a better solution for the frustration they can create. And here is where Kanban comes in: Kanban offers a model to view, reason about, and manage dependencies that doesn't rely on reorganization but collaboration between delivery managers. This talk will explore that model and the techniques associated with it, including more "exotic" techniques like Reservation Systems and "surprising" strategies like "Let it be! Let it be!"