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Is anyone using Kanban (or scrumban) for the agile management practices? What is your experience with Kanban? How does it work in large complex environments with dependencies on waterfall projects?
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I know the BBC use it quite extensively. See David Joyce's blog for more details http://leanandkanban.wordpress.com/
He has a quite hefty slide deck in there to sift through.
I think the thing to remember about Lean thinking is that you must consider the value stream as a whole. Whilst you can super optimise the development team using techniques such as Kanban, it is more important to incorporate both up stream (Management/Analysis) and downstream (QA/deployment/support) to fully reap the rewards.
Therefore, to ask how does this fit into a Waterfall or complex process (beyond your personal effect), is not quite the right question. What is a more important question is to ask how can I begin to effect the entire value stream. I know this sounds like the beginning of religious Lean zealotry, but it is how you will realise the true value of a lean process.
For example, consider the following scenario for a typical project:
Total: 43 months
If by applying Lean to the development process you improve by 100%, ie a development time of 4.5 months, bringing a new total of 38.5 months. You have then only increased the total value stream by just over 10%... insignificant!!
You need to begin to fight the fight and take the Lean thinking to upper management and demonstrate where real success lies... which is in the re-design of the entire process.
Remember Lean is NOT a development process, it can be applied to every aspect of the business.
Some interesting books on how to take this discussion beyond the the development team include;
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