Here are three primary challenges that traditional project managers and project management have that complex Kanplexity solves… yes, you read that right, it SOLVES.

1. FLOW

Traditional project management is more about resource efficiency than flow efficiency, and the Kanban aspect of Kanplexity can help you to:

1. improve your throughput;
2. reduce how long things take (cycle time); and
3. improve how much time we have to think.

So that we can actually come up with much better ideas and better satisfy customers.

I think by keeping people busy, a lot of traditional project managers end up actually shooting themselves in the foot and not delivering stuff sooner.

We can get some feedback earlier. You don’t even have to be using something like Scrum to do that. You can, using Kanplexity and the Kanban part of Kanplexity, you can find out and get feedback from your customers much sooner about what’s really going on.

So improving the flow, and improving feedback would be one of the challenges.

2. How do you react to challenges?

We’re dealing with an uncertain world and challenges get thrown in front of us every single day. What do you do and how do you react? A lot of what we do is we react the way we always did.

If you’re big into process, you might think, if you change the process, everything’s gonna be fine.

If you’re very technical, you might think if you just have more people working on the problem, we’ll get it sorted.

If you’re a politician or battlefield commander, you might say, let’s just get everybody in the room, we might sort it (which is actually a very good way of dealing with a complex problem).

If you’re dealing with negative chaos, you might say, well maybe I need to turn into a dictator and tell everybody what to do so that we can sort things out.

The thing is that if you do what you always did, your mode of action will probably not be appropriate for the situation that’s in front of you.

What we need is some tool that will help you to figure out what is the right course of action. The Cyenfin sense-making framework is used in Kanplexity as a compass to help you to figure out what’s the next right thing to do. If your normal approach is to get everybody in the room, but actually Tom and Ben are the experts of this particular issue, we just need Tom and Ben to figure this out together, we don’t need everybody else. They know what to do. It’s complicated but they’ll figure it out. They’re the experts.

If it’s a situation where Ben knows what to do, he’s been doing this for years, we just trust him to get the job done, and nobody needs to work with him. He just needs to crack on and do it.

But if there’s a situation where actually we don’t know what we don’t know maybe just relying on the experts won’t solve it, maybe we need some fresh thinking from another person to freshen up the way we’re thinking about a particular problem. Perhaps have a different perspective on what kind of problem it might be because it might not be the problem that we think it is.

So flow and earlier feedback (see point 1 of this blogpost) and also having a compass to help you to figure out what you do next is an orientation reference in the Kanplexity guide for exactly that reason.

• What do you facilitate?
• What do you optimize for?
• What do you measure? What do you focus on measurement-wise?

3. Figuring out what to do as a leader when you are dealing with a project

The third challenge is, if you think of Scrum for example, there really is no home for you in Scrum as a traditional project manager. I’m a Scrum trainer myself. The standard answers are you can be a developer on the Scrum team. You can be doing the work. You might be very good at, for example, dealing with compliance stakeholders, the work that needs to be done as part of the product backlog. So you can do that. You can be a developer.

Or maybe you’re actually making some product. You could be a product owner, but the danger of that is if you don’t switch your mindset from short to medium-term time, budget, and scope to long-term customer value thinking more about owning the product, not just project, but the product, you actually conflate the words project and products as though they are the same thing.

You might be the wrong person to be a product owner. If your style tends to be more micromanagement, you might not be a very suitable scrum master. Now, we probably wouldn’t want you to be micromanaging in any case, and we probably would want you to balance the short term with the long term, but what’s really nice about Kanplexity is it gives you a guide about what you do as a leader when you’re dealing with a project. There’s actually a description for a responsibility, where there’s an agile leader that acts as a guide and you don’t need an artificial role like scrum master or product owner to move things along.

You could argue as a project manager is also an artificial role, but you have someone who is a leader who can help the team to figure out who can help, who can understand how to read that compass. Who can understand well what way the flow is working and help the team to become more effective. You can still get out of the way but you’ll be operating much more like an agile leader.

Kanplexity gives you guidance on exactly what you need to do, what you need to be focused on.

1. So how can we improve that flow? How can we get quicker feedback?
2. How can we read that compass to figure out the right thing to do? AND
3. How can we give you the knowledge so that you know how to read that Compass?

Kanplexity.