Last week, my colleague Navin and I had the pleasure and – indeed – the honor of meeting some of the best minds in Europe at the Kanban Leadership Retreat at Mayrhofen, Austria!
Based on the announcement made there by Lean Kanban, Inc. (LKI), we are thrilled to announce the availability of SwiftKanban and SwiftESP for all Accredited Kanban Trainers (AKTs) and Kanban Coaching Professionals (KCPs)!
Ever since David J Anderson conceptualized and defined the famous “Kanban Method” for knowledge work, we have been fortunate to have been able to work with some of the key thought leaders in the Kanban community to build the SwiftKanban product. Each interaction has been an opportunity of learning; each event we have attended and many times sponsored, we have better understood the nuances of focusing on flow in systems to enable not just greater agility, but better risk management, dramatically improved predictability and greater throughput/ reduced time to market.
The Kanban Method – defined in detail in the famous Kanban ‘Blue Book’ – provided the foundational principles and practices of much of the method as it exists even today. Of course, along with the way it has been enriched and enhanced by the work of several other collaborators with David. (To learn more about Kanban, please visit here).
Enterprise Services Planning – a Modern Management Method
Given its origins in manufacturing and its applicability to not only software and IT but all other knowledge work, its appeal has been (and is) broad based. In 2013-2014 it was being referred to as a “Modern Management Method” and by 2015, the concept of Enterprise Services Planning was born. We, at Digité in Cupertino, were fortunate to have witnessed David’s early sketch of the concept as comprehensive portfolio management, demand and capacity/ capability balancing, risk governance based system that enabled an organization to optimize the flow of services delivery across the organization!
It was/ is a system that lets enterprise Portfolio and risk managers – and senior management, to look at their enterprise holistically and provide answers to tough questions such as –
- Which items (new products or features, new services, projects) to take up next?
- What would be the cost of delay of not starting something by a certain date?
- What was the organization’s (or sub-organizations’) overall demand profile and delivery capability?
- How to provide more accurate predictions with specific confidence factors as to when some work might get done?
- When was the last responsible moment to start something and finish it on time?
and many more…
The result of that sketch and the discussion that ensued that balmy afternoon in Cupertino has been our SwiftESP journey. We see it as a path-breaking, data-driven, model-based modern Visual Portfolio Management method that will revolutionize how organizations and leaders deal with managing portfolios and take informed decisions about what services the organizations should work on delivering when in an optimized manner throughout the organization.
SwiftESP has been in the works for some time since late 2015 and now has sufficiently rich functionality to become a powerful tool in the hands of senior decision makers. With this latest version, we have provided a certain amount of sample data for an easier trial of the SwiftESP module and subsequent adoption. Of course, it will continue to be enhanced in the coming releases based on feedback from you, our partners in this journey!
SwiftESP for AKTs/ KCPs and consultants!
SwiftESP needs the Enterprise license of SwiftKanban (more details on our various packages and prices here). As a result of the collaboration between Digité and Lean Kanban, Inc., both the SwiftKanban and SwiftESP modules are available free of cost to all AKTs and KCPs for personal use and in small/ boutique consulting scenarios. The full details and the terms of their availability are provided here.
If you are an AKT or a KCP (or a consultant in the Lean/ Kanban/ Agile Portfolio Management space), please do take a look to see if you would be interested in trying out this revolutionary way to manage portfolio and risk. We look forward to hearing from you!
If you like what you see here, please do share this with your friends and colleagues. You can learn more about Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) here and about the features of SwiftESP here.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please drop us an email at marketing@digite.com.
Mahesh Singh
Co-founder, Sr. VP