Can Do Kanban

It's been a whirlwind of activity the last few weeks - meetings, projects and wonderful, insightful sessions with innovation leaders from Tesla, Samsung, Oppenheimer and more.   I've been so inspired and impressed that I went back wondering: how could it be that there are so many brilliant people in the world  doing extraordinary things while at the same time 'regular' people and projects and organizations struggle just to move off of dead center.  What separates those who can and do from those who try and fall short, or don't even really try at all.  

In an effort to not mislead with this post, I won't even pretend to answer the above since I've given up long ago trying to figure out the real reasons why people do or don't do things - simply I've come to the conclusion that in most cases it's a matter of the two D's - direction and drive.  Which brings me to the question of  today's post - what is the optimal way of bringing people closer to experiencing both direction and drive and is there a way to make the entire path  of work more productive, less ad-hoc and more rewarding for diverse groups of people some of whom don't get their high from strictly individual achievement.

EPAM has been experimenting with some incredibly exciting disciplines for structured innovation and optimal decision making.  One in particular, TRIZ is really exciting as a framework for helping to optimize investments in innovation programs. But my favorite experiment to date has been in running Kanban for all things Marketing in 2015.  

Kanban, for those who are not into Japanese business philosophy is used most often in manufacturing and increasingly in the development of software, along with other Lean techniques.  Definition from wikipedia below:

Kanban (かんばん ?) (literally signboard or billboard in Japanese) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. Kanban is a system to control the logistical chain from a production point of view, and is an inventory control system.

Although the idea of using Kanban and Lean for Marketing is not new (I've found references from 1993 even to the same basic principles) what is new is our ability to incorporate better tracking and automation tools and really roll up a fully global program using a combination of Scrum and Kanban.  The former allows our technology tasks to be treated as part of a continuous backlog and allows us to work on multiple concurrent streams almost with real-time adjustments, and the latter helps us keep the big blocks or projects straight and organized in a very clear and democratic way.  Direction is clear because high level priorities and programs are consistent for longer periods of time and Drive is also there because Burn Down is King.  Woe to the man or woman who misses the Marketing Approvals meetings - he/she holds up the burn down!

And because we do so many distributed, experimental activities and rely so heavily on co-creation with our partners in business and external agencies, our ability to be not only the creative but also the organizational arm of the endeavor gives the team more credibility than I've seen in traditional marketing groups.  That's not to say that we don't have our share of struggles - but if our experiment is pointing out one thing - it's absolutely clear that it's difficult to address issues that are not in plain site.  And a Kanban board is a good way to see it, fix it and move past the blockers to immediate gratification.

To get a leg up on making this experiment a success,  our organization even looks a bit different than what I've seen clients attempt.  We have a real Product/Delivery Manager who runs the entire process and acts as the intake.  Truly, the degree of collaboration and the speed and relative lack of drama with which things are happening is making me think that there is something here and I had a thought of productizing both the approach and the toolset structure to help anyone else who wants to play with Lean Marketing, run their own experiments.

I consider myself to be extremely lucky in having to rely on an organization who's been Agile longer than most others, but still - when it comes to creating a format for bringing direction and drive to marketing and mixing it with a good measure of accomplishment, I'm quite pleased with the results so far and I'm absolutely thrilled with the structure's ability to get the best results from a very diverse set of teams and individuals.

Our Kanban program will continue for the foreseeable future along with our continuous marketing release culture and our focus on following a clear direction with drive.