Kanban made easy with Coveys 4Disciplines

Being on the Kanban path this week took me back to thinking about the 4 Disciplines of Execution by Franklin Covey. This training is one of the best workshops I have ever attended and overall some of the best training I have ever received. It is staggering some of the numbers that they quote such as:

What is happening in your organization?

How many people on your work team know the organization’s most important goals? 58%
How many people on your team know how they’re doing on those goals? 35%
How many people know exactly what they are supposed to do to help achieve the organization’s most important goals? 54%
Does your team consistently plan together to achieve their most important goals? 47%

This is a video preview of Store 334, a video featured in FranklinCovey’s Leadership and Execution workshops. Grocery Store 334 had its share of troubles. When manager Jim Dixon got everyone clear on the store goal, he thought his work was done. But only when everyone was accountable for the goal and empowered to make decisions did things start to change. To learn more please visit: http://www.franklincovey.com/.

The premise of the 4 Disciplines of Execution are…

1. Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important – Human beings are wired to do only one thing at a time with excellence. The more we narrow our focus, the greater the chance of achieving our goals with excellence. Discuss what must be done or nothing else will matter. Using a tool called the Importance Screen, learn how so identity and narrow all of the possible goals down to 2 or 3 critical things that must be done with excellence. Learn how to create a ” line of sight” from your goals to the company goals.
2. Discipline 2: Create a Compelling Scoreboard – People play differently when they’re keeping score. Work through a process of identifying specific measures for those goals that have been identified in Discipline 1. Understand the difference between “leading” and “lagging” indicators. Using a tool called the Measurement Builder, create a team “scoreboard” that informs and motivates everyone contributing to the achievement of the goal(s}.
3. Discipline 3: Translate Lofty Goals into Specific Actions – To achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before. Using an entrepreneurial model, challenge the group to identify new behaviors that will result in new (better) outcomes. Learn the methods for finding the best behaviors by identifying where they might already exist in your or other’s organizations, or by brainstorming and then creating the best behaviors that don’t currently exist anywhere. These new behaviors are then translated in to very specific activities on a weekly basis which, when completed, will help to achieve the larger team goals.
4. Discipline 4: Hold Each Other Accountable – All of the Time – Knowing others are counting on you raises your level of commitment. Understand where you and your team are on the “scale of commitment” regarding the goal, and what you can do to increase the level of commitment to the goal. Address the actual practice to be used (WIG Session) in keeping the team engaged and focused on the top goals. Focus on four critical elements of this process; 1. Meeting is about the WIG’s, 2. “Triage” Reporting. 3. Finding 3rd Alternatives, 4. Clearing the Path for each other.

My reason for reviewing these principles is it simply made a great outline for creating a Kanban and the daily meeting. The team scoreboard became the Kanban board, the daily meeting focused on the WIG and held everyone accountable and the Goals were the Stories broken down into story points and further into the specific actions. This outline for me provided clarity when taking a marketing function or campaign and converting to a Value Stream and eventually to a Kanban or maybe even a Scrumban.

Bottom line is start with the CD, The 4 Disciplines of Execution (Revised Edition): The Secret to Getting Things Done, On Time, With Excellence.

And as Jim Benson would say of Personal Kanban: