A growing company usually means adding more people to the team to handle the additional workload. But adding personnel also adds costs: recruiting, onboarding, training, extra workspace & equipment, never mind salary and benefits. Hiring the wrong people escalates the costs and slashes ROI – think dismissal, turnover, and going through the whole recruitment, onboarding, and training process again.
While hiring new people is sometimes inevitable to keep pace with company growth, that’s not always the case. I was recently putting together an ROI calculation to help a potential client better understand the financial impact that my work has on teams within an organization. In fact, using the Kanban Method can double productivity in less than a year, without making a single additional hire.
Having a smaller but more productive team not only makes it easier to manage but also easier to coordinate work.
Kanban provides the tools you need to take that team of 20and have them operate just like a team of 40. Having a smaller but more productive team not only makes it easier to manage but also easier to coordinate work. The benefit of doubling capability while keeping operational costs the same is obvious.
But at the end of the day, if you’re going to invest time and money in the Kanban Method, you need to be sure there will be a return on your investment. So what return is typical from the Kanban Method?
Typical results from 3 to 6 months
- Reduced overburdening of employees within teams using the Kanban Method
- 5% to 10% decrease in operational costs
from 7 to 12 months
- Even more reduced overburdening across teams
- 100% increase in throughput (e.g., features per month for a software development team – which means the work of eight people done by just four people)
- 10% to 50% decrease in time-to-market (e.g. how long features take to deliver to customers)
- Increased customer satisfaction
from 13 to 24 months
- 150% increase in throughput
- An even higher increase in customer satisfaction
In less than a year, the Kanban Method can increase productivity, improve product and service quality, and enhance agility for your delivery team to handle unexpected developments – like surprise orders.
To illustrate, let’s look at Vanguard as a case study. Vanguard is an investment management company that had been struggling to improve production using scrum for a year, with less-than-optimal results.
Once Vanguard started to implement the Kanban Method, the company really got its Ps and Qs in order. Team P improved its delivery time by 78%—not in a year, but in 90 days. Team Q had nearly identical success, improving its delivery time by 77%, also in 90 days.
Is your company experiencing rapid growth that is far outdistancing the capacity of your delivery team? Let IntelliPivot demonstrate how Kanban can enable your company to improve capacity without adding personnel or overhead.
In other words, work smarter, not harder!
