Kanban-Empowered Digital Transformation

Introduction

Boa Vista is a Brazilian company that combines analytical intelligence with high technology to transform data into financial solutions that address the challenges of B2B and B2C customers. Their mission is to generate value for society by providing the best information to reach prosperity sustainably through agility and precision.

To live up to that mission, Boa Vista was looking for ways to accelerate project delivery and to be able to adapt to changing customer needs quickly. 

Kanban-Empowered Digital Transformation

To accelerate project execution and improve the project workflow, Boa Vista started by restructuring their departments and teams and reducing work items' batch size.

Тhe next decision in front of Boa Vista was how to organize their ways of working.
Some of their goals included:

• Making processes and operations leaner without forcing any unnecessary changes
• Tackling the current pain points of the different functions and enabling them to improve steadily over time
• Achieving transparency to prevent misalignment, communication noise, difficulty in identifying bottlenecks, and lack of collaboration.

With the consensus at the top management level, Boa Vista chose Kanban as an evolutionary approach towards reaching these digital transformation goals and committed to following the Kanban Maturity Model to support all implementation and evolvement efforts. 

Aligning Strategic, Tactical and Operational Levels with Kanban(ize)

Starting with physical boards, soon after Boa Vista moved to Kanbanize to further evolve in their Kanban implementation.  

The platform allowed the to structure the Team Kanban boards in five levels, bringing strategic goals, risk management, and continuous improvement efforts closer to the teams' daily operations and breaking down silos.

To further support the alignment of the different company levels, Boa Vista also introduced various Kanban cadences and created ceremonies on the operational, tactical, and strategic levels as feedback loops that ensure a smooth information flow across the organization.

Data-Driven Continuous Improvement

After implementing Kanbanize, the platform's built-in Analytics module gave Boa Vista the needed visibility and data on the different teams' performance. As part of the weekly risk review meetings, teams on the tactical level started going over the various charts to examine the flow's stability and identify areas that need attention by analyzing outliers and identifying flow interruptions. 

Key Results

• Through Kanbanize, strategic goals, risk management, and continuous improvement efforts came closer to the teams' daily operations.
• Linking team initiatives and company OKRs on the same board ensured better alignment between the different company levels.
• Introducing Kanban cadences on operational, tactical, and strategic levels helped strengthen this alignment by ensuring smooth information flow in the organization.
• Working in smaller batches, combined with the new level of visibility and alignment, gave Boa Vista more flexibility to react and adapt more quickly if needed.
• Kanbanize Analytics enabled teams to monitor their performance closely and evolve their work process based on data.
• The systematic enhancement of workflows based on performance analysis helped establish a data-driven approach to Continuous Improvement.
• Combining Kanban metrics and focused efforts to reach a higher KMM level supported Boa Vista to achieve their digital transformation goals.

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