Nagaraja Gundappa specializes in multiple aspects of digital transformation that includes agile software delivery, business process management and lean six sigma and innovation. He was General Manager, Delivery Excellence at Wipro Technologies before starting his consulting firm ACE. He teaches Design Thinking, Kanban, SAFe, Scrum, PMP, Lean Six Sigma and TOGAF.

He was a part of vision task force of Wipro Technologies and was involved in implementation of innovation funnel. He has used that background and applied Upstream Kanban at a client site to help implement organization-wide innovation.

He is a speaker at several industry forums including PMI and Agile Network India and has more than a dozen papers and presentations. He has also won several awards for innovation and excellence.

Upstream Kanban for Lean Portfolio management

In today’s fast changing business world, business agility is imperative for survival and success of the business. A key to achieving business agility is innovation at the organization level.

Implementing organization wide innovation has multiple challenges in idea generation, idea selection, mitigation of investment risks, managing employee morale to name the important ones.

Upstream Kanban can be of help here in dividing the innovation into multiple stages and mapping them to the columns in a Kanban board. Idea selection and risk mitigation can be implemented through the policies of the Kanban system.

This paper presents a case study of innovation management through upstream Kanban, explains the actual challenges faced before and illustrates the Kanban board and actual policies and the benefits obtained by implementing innovation as upstream Kanban.