The Improvement Kata

Some Context : The world we live in

Everchanging market expectations

• a fast service and even self-service

• (personal) attention

• authenticity

Everchanging workplace expectations

• Growth of Enterprise leadership with a more collaborative style with common goals

• EQ > IQ when it comes to leadership

• Soft skills will flourish ( different generations, diversity, … )

• More transparency via social media & digital tooling

The new way of working normalizing:

• The COVID-19 world-wide pandemic pushed organisations years forward in this digital era.

  • The workplace changed overnight with people having to work from home

  • The workplace change overnight with new rules needed to be implemented.

  • Consumers behaving in a different way and expecting the same service online and offline

  • Changed strategy to address the customers

From Rationalism to Empiricism

VISION

Our vision it to create a better every-day workplace and relearn people about how work “works”. We do this by confronting ourselves with our quest for enhanced agility; rethinking organizational design and so rebuild organizations from the ground up. We believe in the empowerment of people and use this to unleash the true potential inside this organizations via co-creation and collaboration. We grow cultures of amazement.

BELIEFS

• Act Different, because it’s needed

• Behave in an agile way,  Operate in full transparency and Openness

• Together Everyone Achieves More

• Challenge ourselves to become the best possible version of ourselves \

Never say never, because limits, like fears, are often just an illusion  - Michael Jordan -

We aim for

Pillars of Agile Frameworks

A Pragmatic approach to Continuous Improvement

What is a Kata?

The approach for a Kata

An Improvement Kata example

Assess:

• Business is complaining about the quality of the Product

• In most retrospectives, teams complain about the vague analysis

• Reporting shows huge impact on budget because of poor quality (many change requests, multiple bugs):
  a high cost because of poor quality

Prepare:

• Theme for KATA: build in quality early in the process: user stories with acceptance criteria

• Obsess with experts in writing user stories and 

Experiment:

• Mindset: understand the importance of a DEEP Product Backlog and the impact of having an unhealthy product backlog

• Teams discuss expectations and adjust their teams’ Definition of Ready/Done

• Workshops from experts on the engineering practice with regards to making a shift left and build in quality early in the process. 

• Coaching from scrum master and engineering manager

Measure progress:

• Changed Definition Of Done / Make rules explicit / Ownership

• Measure progress of ‘poor quality’ via Reporting

Positioning the Kata

Basically, this is a framework to make sure continuous improvement can be initiated from a higher level towards all squads. 

In the initial example I've shared with you, I've explained that out of retrospectives or black box engineering sessions, we could identify that multiple teams suffer from the same lack of automation. And so an improvement KATA for initiating test automation could be seen as a solution. For a couple of teams, this could be 'eazy peazy' since they've had also adopted the basics (or even master is), for others it can be completely new. The strength of an improvement KATA lies in the fact that for these fundamental items, you could set the record straight for those who are already further evolved, yet still improve with the squads that have no clue where to start.  

So yes ... it is a governance structure to help the organisation embracing continuous improvement whilst funnelling all incoming initiatives from all sides.