Agile Project Management with Kanban at Ekide

Introduction

Ekide Group is a leading technology company, offering its services in three areas: Engineering and Manufacturing, Control Tools, and Artificial Vision. About six years ago, Ekide inaugurated a new department - Machine Vision. This new line of business was very successful, and demand began to grow rapidly. As a result, the workload increased exponentially, and the first problems appeared. Issues occurred in the development times of the products, the management of multi-projects, and the efficiency of the work.

Before Kanbanize

To solve these problems and recover their agility, Ekide Group needed а shared visibility of all the projects to synchronize the management between the different specialties (mechanical engineers, software developers, workshop workers) and departments.

Looking for a solution, they decided to contact Berriprocess Agility, a consultancy specializing in helping companies improve the management of their business with Kanban in the Basque Country. The first step in the Kanban method for Ekide Group was a practical training day of Kanban, after which they created a physical Kanban board for hardware work and a virtual one for software. 

A few months after starting with Kanban, the project managers began to face issues with the physical board and started searching for a solution for the following problems:

• Difficult to visualize all the work in progress and the dependencies between tasks 
• Lack of planning and project management at the portfolio level  
• Lack of an adequate way to collect metrics and analyze their data  
• Need to define specifications of projects and tasks
  
  

Key Results

Introducing Kanbanize has brought several significant process improvements for Ekide Group:

Developed a work breakdown structure to segment complex tasks into smaller, more manageable portions

Starting to implement Kanbanize, the first step was to define the workflow from beginning to end. For their needs, Ekide Group created and adjusted their Kanban boards by department (hardware, software, and manufacturing). 

Combining these Team Kanban boards with a Portfolio Kanban board, Ekide Group created a transparent work breakdown structure from top to bottom. For this purpose, company projects were visualized as cards on the Portfolio Board and segmented into sub-tasks as cards on the Team boards.  

Created an advanced, automated workflow that aids task assignment and decision making, encouraging cross-team collaboration

Integrating Kanbanize with their other management systems (RSP, Autodesk Inventor Professional, etc.) allowed Ekide Group to automate card creation, time tracking, and more, eliminating much manual bureaucratic work from their workflow. The new automated workflow system also helped them cut down wasteful steps in their project execution and optimize the overall project efficiency. 

Gained real-time, company-wide visibility of all active projects and dependencies

Managing project with Kanbanize Ekide Group gained a real-time overview of the status of all projects at different levels, including indications of blockages, delays, and risks associated with them. This new level of visibility facilitated conversations about the dependencies between projects, decisions about what to start and what to postpone, the risks associated with the projects, as well as the forecast of when a project could start and end. It also enabled teams to prioritize better in order to meet client expectations.

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