The fourth Kanban Leadership Retreat is now history. After meeting in Iceland and twice in Austria, the Kanban world met this time in the beautiful harbor town of Cascais in Portugal. Katrin Dietze (LEANability) and Irina Dzhambazova (David J. Anderson & Associates) moderated the two-day “unconference” where the participants determine the program on-site. This year, not only did in-depth topics such as Minimum Viable No Estimates, Role-based Guidance and Fitness for Purpose make the program , but also fundamental topics such as Portfolio Management, WIP-Limits and Better Visualization which we personally liked very much.
Klaus Leopold (LEANability) created a session about the topic of “Flight Levels and Service Delivery” in which he initially asked the relatively harmless question of whether or not the Kanban concept of Service Delivery can be explained using Flight Levels. This question ignited an intense discussion in which the communication model of Flight Levels was rigorously examined. The result of this session, in which David Anderson was also quite active, was indeed rather surprising: Flight Levels are quite universally applicable. With Flight Levels, you have a tool at hand which can be well used to explain numerous aspects of Kanban as well as Service Delivery: Where and how can Kanban be applied within a company? In order to explain the problem – Often we see smoke coming from the teams, but the fire is found at a completely different part of the company (thank you Jose Casal for this great metaphor) and finally, the currently very modern topic of agile scalability can be well explained using the Flight Levels. Kanban is namely inherently scalable – You do not need anything else other than “real” Kanban which is so much more than just a couple of Post-its on the wall!