Читать книгу Digital Government Excellence - Siim Sikkut - Страница 86

We used the Kanban tools. We had targets on the board at all times, and weekly we looked through them in the management group as well as in the unit meetings. We focused on how things were moving forward, what the schedules were, were we meeting the targets, and if we needed to make critical changes. This way I had very clear targets in my mind all the time, once we had agreed what we wanted to take forward.

We had one common Kanban board for the whole department. It was important because then everybody was able to see where we were heading and how things were going. At a monthly meeting after every quarter, we went through all the big programs or targets we had for the department and highlighted in traffic light mode of red-yellow-green how things stood. If anything was in red, meaning late or not doing well, there was explanation also in the notes on the board. When we had success and big things were green, we celebrated. I took quarterly review practice with me from the private sector.

Of course, politicians do come and say that something needs to be done additionally. Then you do have a prioritization issue because if you do not have enough persons, you do have to see what formerly planned things you will just have to do later. Well, it can also happen that you deprioritize and then two months later the minister comes and asks where is the thing that was promised earlier? I did then honestly always say that we had to prioritize. I usually had taken such cases to the political level before, giving them options and asking what we should prioritize if we had to choose. Kanban was also a useful tool to talk prioritization and resourcing through on a management team level within the department, such as when borrowing and moving people from unit to unit.

The Kanban board had a column for proposals that we had not decided yet if we would move forward or not. The proposals were on the level of initiatives that had already had some work in them, but we also included raw ideas as well.