Many people in Agile and IT talk about Toyota Kata, but it seems very few have tried it out for real at any scale or duration and actual cases are far between. In this presentation I will share my last 4 years of experience with Toyota Kata and especially the job of scaling it across all layers of a 700 people IT organization. How does it translate to a context where the flow of value is counted in days and not seconds? Where did we fail, what adaptions were made, what results did we achieve and why is it both more powerful and more difficult than any of us believed?

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Your improvement potential is bigger than you think!
LKCE, November 2018
Jesper Boeg
www.AgileUpgrade.com
agileupgrade@gmail.com

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WHO AM I?
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6 years with Toyota Kata
From a single team in 2012 to strategic organization wide initiative in 2017-
2018
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Improvement is not invited to the party
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We are setup for “Business as usual”
“Projects and workshops ≠ continuous improvement”
Mike Rother, Toyota Kata 2009
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“What you see is all there is”
The “Daily Whirlwind” of defects and features quickly consume close to
100% of our capacity
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And the improvements we do make…
“Often our improvements are based on reactive problem solving - effectively
anchoring us in our current process. Removing what you don’t want does not
get you what you do want”
- Me, 2018
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Ambition level?

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Kanban and world domination
My perspective in 2010
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But few people are process “geeks”
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Let us be honest
Using e.g. the core Kanban Practices for systematic daily improvement is
not a natural state for most managers and teams.
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Mandatory cute animal slide
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WHAT IS TOYOTA KATA AND HOW IS IT
DIFFERENT
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Competitive advantage
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Adapting Toyota Kata to another context
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Manufactur
ing
Knowledge-work
Cycle-
time:
Sec./Min. Days/weeks
Variability
:
low high
Accuracy: high low
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team
Team
TeamTeam
Team
VALUE

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Towards desirable “capabilities”
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Imagine an organization…
Where you could ask the following 5 “process improvement” questions, to
all managers and teams and get a clear response:
What are you trying to achieve?
Where are you now?
What obstacle is in your way?
What is your next step and what do you expect?
When can you go and see what you have learned from taking that step?
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Toyota Kata is directed improvement
Focusing on establishing core capabilities
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Agile “True North” example headlines
Strategic alignment
Empowered, Self-organizing teams.
Stable end-to-end teams with 100% allocation
Always releasable – all code, any time, fully automated on demand
Small batches (MVP, MVF) always outside-in approach
Visual Management – full transparency
Continuous qualitative and quantitative customer and end-user feedback
One-by-one flow (Limit WIP)
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Toyota Kata is measurable improvement
Time-bound and a clear Target
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Examples - Targets
From 10 to 1 expedites per week
From 1 to 6 periods of 3 hours of uninterrupted work per day per team
(without unscheduled work, meetings or external interruptions)
From 15 to 2 times WIP limits are broken per week (without increasing the
limit)
From 50% to 20% of work-items getting blocked for more than 3 hours by
external problems during execution
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Toyota Kata is iterative
Navigating through unclear territory
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Examples
They declined the meeting
John got sick
Tool did not work with our platform
No early adopters signed up
We got even more blockers
No valuable feedback was received
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Toyota Kata is a culture of daily improvement
Which means taking very small steps and teaching our brain to cope with
“stress”
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Examples
Carl won’t be here tomorrow, can Henrik do it instead?
If we need a session with all 5 people it will not be until 10 days from now.
Could we learn anything from just doing it with 3 people in two days?
What is keeping us all from trying out Pair Programming for 2 hours
tomorrow morning. Would we learn anything from that?
Can we call them now and ask instead of writing an email later?
Do we need to install the tool to reach the first learning point or could we
simply check if somebody has ever used it on our legacy platform?
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“At Toyota, improving and managing are one and the same.
Non-Toyota companies tend to see managing as a unique and
separate activity. Improvement is something extra, added on to
managing”
Toyota Kata (2010), Mike Rother
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TOYOTA KATA INCLUDES TWO KATAS
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Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata
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Coaching Kata
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Leading vs. Lagging indicators
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It is not that we do not like Outcome
What makes customers happy:
Throughput – they get more or cheaper
Cycle/Lead time – they get it faster
Quality/Defect rate – they get it in better quality
Predictability – they get a more predictable service
Value delivered (can be difficult to measure) – they get something better
suited to their needs
Mean time to recovery – they get a more stable service
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Outcome metrics are important
But they are not useful to drive daily continuous improvement
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As an added bonus
Unlike Outcome metrics leading process metrics are long term and not
likely to be “gamed”
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If you truly trust the 6 core Kanban practices
Kanban and Toyota Kata fits like a hand in a glove
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You can’t tell people to “trust”
Ownership, shared responsibility, experimentation, trust and leadership
have much greater chances of success if you deliver on the core
capabilities
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Current Condition data 1/2
Historic data and the 80/20 rule
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Current Condition data 2/2
Mapping “knowledge discovery activities” and their related data
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Book will be out soon
Email me if you are interested in reviewing or to be notified
AgileUpgrade@gmail.com
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Teeka supports Toyota Kata
For mature or distributed teams
Will open for early adopters soon
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THANKS!
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Contact information
Jesper Boeg
Mail: agileupgrade@gmail.com
Mobile: +45 51 54 28 20
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesperboeg/
Website/blog: www.agileupgrade.com
Travelsite/blog: www.4globetrotters.world
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