In a recent conversation with a colleague, it was mentioned that the mandate from their organization's leadership was to find ways to "deliver more with the same": essentially same budget, same people, same timelines, etc.
Of course it is very well possible that your organization is "under-provisioned" (that is, lacking enough people, resources, and capacity in general) to produce the kind of results that are expected of it. But, it might not: perhaps there's a better way to allocate the available capacity that will yield better results. The question then is, how you can prove it either way.
Well, I think that Kanban as a management method can help you figure out the answer either way.
A quick digression: you could certainly question the wisdom of this "more with same" mandate, argue that it's misguided, that the focus should be "outcomes not output", etc. Fair enough, but I'm assuming here that, as a Delivery Manager, you're not in the position to directly influence that kind of strategic decisions. That said, the Kanban Method does give you tools to exert indirect influence. See the end of the list below. 😉
How Kanban can help
Ok. We need to "do more with the same". How do we think through this challenge?
Before anything else, do "more" of what? What are the "things" Leadership wold like to see more of?
From the Kanban Toolbox: Customer Recognizable Work Item Types. Let's agree on some concrete delivery, that it's meaningful for the Business, and that can be used as unit of commitment. Things like Features, Capabilities, Incident Resolutions, Support Tickets, etc. Avoid nebulous aggregates (or batches) like Projects, and Releases, and terms that by now are devoid of customer meaning (User Stories, Epics, Tasks).
If you're not "delivering more" today, it means that there's a constraint to the flow of that work (otherwise, with no constraints, your process would be able to deliver infinite amounts and all this would be a non-issue). That flow must be through "something". Let's say it's a workflow consisting of a series of activities: What do you know about how that workflow is structured?
From the Kanban Toolbox: Workflow Mapping; Commitment & Delivery Points. Build a model of your process as a seres of activities, performed collaboratively by people, to discover the knowledge and information necessary to deliver the work they produce. Along the way, they make promises (commitments) and deliveries at specific points.
If you need to "do more", what is "more"? What do you know about the current volume of work delivered? How far is it from "more"?
From the Kanban Toolbox: Throughput Metrics & Charts. Understanding of Variation. Value vs. Failure Demand. Fitness Criteria Threshold. Build a quantitative model to understand fluctuations in your flow, what's considered appropriate, and how much of your efforts go toward producing value vs. addressing shortcomings.
What do you know about how flow is currently regulated?
From the Kanban Toolbox: Work assignment policies. Workflow Transition Policies. Commitment & Delivery Policies. People follow rules (both explicit and implicit) to make decisions and take action. Build a shared understanding of what those rules are.
What do you know about how is flow currently impeded?
From the Kanban Toolbox: WIP Metrics & Policies. Sources of Delay (Queues, Buffers, Dependencies, Multitasking). Blocker Clustering. Identify your most common process design choices that introduce delays. We also know that the amount of work in process (WIP) has a direct effect in flow; build understanding of the current level of WIP and the policies that currently regulate it (or not).
What are you going to do about all this?
From the Kanban Toolbox: Increase Feedback (visualization, daily stand-up, Service Delivery Review, OpsReview). Improvement through Experiments. Reduce & Manage WIP. Classes of Service. Mitigation/Elimination of Sources of Delay.
What if this is not enough?
OK, let's say that after you apply all the ideas above you're still unable to "do more with same". Your service might then be "under-provisioned" for the expected level of service, but at this point you should have lots of data and models to show it, plus evidence that you can't become any leaner (the constraint has perhaps moved out, and it's not outside your control).
But more importantly, along the way, the introduction of Kanban-inspired practices can also help you change the nature of the conversation with your Leadership so that you don't have to reach this "I can prove you wrong" confrontation.
Some examples:
the introduction of things like Customer Recognizable Work Items can be used to shift the focus from "output to outcomes": you can structure the conversation about which Work Items to use so they represent the result of agreed upon outcomes (using Impact Mapping during facilitation, for example), not just an entry in some backlog.
The discussion of Fitness Criteria Thresholds will help with clarifying what "fitness" is in your context, as well as what it would mean to "over-serve" the Business. You may help Leadership discover a different kind of "more" this way.
If you've introduced regular, repeated review cadences (such as SDRs and OpsReviews involving Leadership), they can help build better empathy over time, better understanding of the delivery challenges, the nature of the obstacles, the kind of help that it's actually missing, etc.
In other words, you can start from where your Leadership is, meet them where they are now, and evolve from there, raising the level of maturity of the organization.
From the Kanban (Coaching) Toolbox: System 1/System 2 rewiring. Understanding of Organizational and Leadership maturity (via the Kanban Maturity Model [KMM]).
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