Improving work visibility and throughput at a large bank department

This bank’s department was responsible for running over one-third of the UK’s domestic payments. Its work was critical not only to the bank but to the UK economy. This meant it was easy to deem most work as urgent, and as a result, there was a tendency to start working on every request. The department had over 15 development teams and provided services to almost all other departments in the bank.

The key problems:

  • A lack of visibility into what each team is working on

  • Work items that have not been prioritised getting onto the backlog

  • Too much work in progress leading to slow development

  • Inconsistent use of workflow stages that meant outputs and governance was missed

  • Projects that run late with little warning

A little history

Improving delivery efficiency has its roots in manufacturing, starting with Henry Ford, who created the first production line. Ford optimised each individual machine and work step. This helped but created large inventories of parts where some process steps ran much faster. Considerable improvements to Ford’s system were implemented by Toyota in their Toyota Product System. This shifted the process from maximising each individual manufacturing step to creating a balanced continuous flow. These concepts are helpful but not as simple to implement in knowledge work, where we don’t produce the same thing every time. David J Anderson took this work and popularised it for knowledge work in his book Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business. Kanban allows you to track and optimise your workflow by highlighting bottlenecks and limiting work in progress. A simple Kanban board is shown below:

Implementation

Jira is a very flexible tool that can create custom Kanban boards. Two workflow levels were created:

  1. The portfolio level - High-level work with expected outcomes

  2. The team level - User stories and task-level tickets linked to portfolio work items

Portfolio-level stages were fully defined with a definition of done for each stage. This gave a common understanding to what was required to move to the next stage and highlighted issues early. The work items were made visible to the whole department and could be filtered by each team. A weekly governance call was set up to walk the portfolio board. This gave the leadership the ability to see inefficiency and help where teams were blocked.

Each team was working inefficiently with different team-level board designs. Many items were blocked for days and work in progress was far too high. Despite some knowledge all of them weren’t focusing on optimising the flow of work. Individual boards were poorly set up and did not include Kanban practices. An activity to carefully move each team across by looking at its current workflow and migrating work items ensued. Vast amounts of old backlog work items surfaced, some important and others simply needing deletion.

Following training and mentoring, the teams were now able to track and optimise their delivery efficiency by looking at metrics like cycle time.

The impact of this change was considerable:

  • Full visibility of what the teams were working on

  • Reduced work in progress that helped the teams avoid being overloaded

  • Portfolio-level work items were no longer started without leadership-level approval

  • Leadership able to see blockers early and help the teams remove these

  • A focus on flow efficiency leading to faster delivery

  • Definition of done for each portfolio stage ensuring strong quality gates

Want to learn more?

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