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Scaled Kanban (Scaling Kanban)

Scaling Kanban (Scaled Kanban) extends the Kanban practices you have learned to a wider network of services, with attention to cross-team dependencies and policies.

Here are some guidelines which will lead you when your organization comes to a stage in which you need to scale your Kanban initiative.

Scaled Kanban Leadership

For any new system or control mechanism to live, there needs to be someone accountable for taking it in and retaining it in place.

That is what the Kanban experts and Kanban project managers should be doing in their organizations. They should be looking after the widespread adoption of the Kanban framework in the organization and take good care of it. Like any other process, Kanban will not maintain itself.

Scaled Kanban Ownership

Elevating ownership stands for getting the team members to engage in building their Kanban boards because their association with it will be more connected and better encouraged by this.

If the Kanban board comes from Kanban team members and not from the higher-level management, it makes better sense for them to want to pursue and use it regularly. That primarily seeds the perception of control and self-organization to the work environment.

Scaling Kanban is not always straightforward, but it is manageable, as observed in many different instances.

Bear in mind that the overall objective for a scaled Kanban initiative is the improvement of the organization-wide processes. Relatively more straightforward methods to learn and use, such as Kanban and Scrum, can bring more clarity and efficiency to organizations, given they are applied with discipline systematically.

Scaled Kanban Discipline

If your team has been using Kanban for some time, you and your team have already figured out that working with Kanban takes a persistent and disciplined effort.

That will remain intact when expanding the Kanban framework to the level of the entire organization. Kanban boards need modifications and enhancements as the process changes and evolves. Global and interdependent policies across multiple teams need constant monitoring, modifications, and optimizations

Your aim is to make sure that the comparable practices apply to the bigger picture, which worked in a smaller Kanban organization.

That is your starting point for a scaled Kanban organization. The rest is continuous fine-tuning.

Scaled Kanban Levels

It is vital to organize your Kanban organization in a configuration that builds small, preferably cross-functional, self-sufficient, and autonomous teams.

Their sovereignty will inspire motivation, speed, and quality of work results. That will also promote their willingness to own the tasks and results. It's a reasonable idea to apply related policies and goals to different Kanban levels of your organizational workflow.

Yet it would be best if you still ensured a suitable degree of autonomy so that teams can forge their own workflows.

Scaled Kanban Policies

Adapt your Kanban policies to the bigger picture of your organization. Remember to preserve your original Kanban policies, which made your initial Kanban initiative successful in the first place. With the growth of your Kanban organization, you need to keep the emerging teams small and self-sufficient. So they will have the ability to quickly form their micro policies and adapt to the policies from the macro-level of your organization.

It is the global Kanban culture that you want to keep persistent across all levels of your organization. The connection and collaboration between micro Kanban teams that build your overall Kanban organization will play a massive role in making your scaled Kanban initiative a success.