Mahesh is an Entrepreneur and a Lean/ Agile Product Management, Marketing & Consulting leader. He began his career in India and has been based in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1992.

He is a co-founder at Digité, Inc., his second startup, where he is currently heads the Marketing & Consulting functions. He is a Kanban University AKT and AKC. As part of his work at Digité, he works with most European and American clients, to provide Lean/ Agile training and coaching; he also runs Digité’s implementation engagements for SwiftKanban and other Digité products.

He is a language/ grammar fanatic, energetic karaoke singer, foodie, chef, movie/ music buff, traveler, enthusiastic swimmer/ biker/ skier/ tennis-ball-cricketer. Wine aficionado. Tea drinker.

Successfully Implementing Kanban with Portfolio/ Upstream Kanban OR Kanban Success with Portfolio and Upstream Kanban

There are many reasons why Kanban has been successful in organizations – from its original promise of evolutionary (non-disruptive) change management to improving teams’ agility in terms of lead time, throughput and flow, to helping organizations balance their capacity with the demand on their services.

However, in spite of these benefits, Kanban coaches and practitioners have struggled to implement Kanban for some of the same challenges that earlier Agile methods have faced, including organization culture, leadership buy-in and organizational change management.

Over the last 2 years, based on the experience with some of our customers, two factors have emerged as real catalysts to successful – sticky, enterprise-wide – implementation of Kanban in the organization. These are Portfolio Kanban and Upstream Kanban.

In this session, I will present what these two techniques mean, how to implement them, how our customers as well as we ourselves at Digité have implemented them, and how they have contributed significantly to Kanban’s success.