Recently, I had the pleasure of doing a guest post on the Lean Blog. The Lean Blog is authored by Mark Graban, a Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Institute and author of the book, Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award. Mark went on a un-wired vacation for a few weeks and left his blog in the hands of a few Lean Bloggers. I was honored to be one of them and if you did not see the post, here is an excerpt of it:

Don’t Market without your Kanban

Most people think about the marketing process as a function of lead generation and follow-up. They envision the marketing funnel which creates an excellent visual image of collecting prospects and narrowing the field till you produce a customer at the bottom. This image is often times a fair reflection of your marketing budget. You spend most of your money reaching out to the masses. It is an expensive proposition and seldom produces measurable results. However, you can’t just cap the funnel because you never know where your next lead or sale will come from.

The job of marketing is to increase prospects, create better odds in obtaining a customer, and increase the number and dollars per customer. I believe marketing is also responsible for decreasing the dollars in obtaining a customer. I think these five parts can be best served through Lean and more specifically using a Marketing Kanban.

If you introduce Lean into marketing it will not take too long before you are creating a Value Stream Map of the process. Most marketing people do not look at marketing as a process so it may take a seasoned mapper to facilitate. Without drilling down too far in the process you can gather numbers of prospects in each segment and the conversion rates as they proceed through your value stream. Typically to accomplish this you must use only one marketing channel at a time or segment your list by a category. When first mapping the process, use the best defined channel so that you do not fight the process.  The Value Stream Map created will be the outline for your Kanban.

It continues on and ends with this paragraph:

Don’t think of Kanban as a planning tool; think about it as an execution tool. Improving your marketing process does not have to constitute wholesale changes nor increased spending. Getting more customers into your Marketing “Kanban” may not solve anything at all. Improving what you do and increasing the speed that you do it may result in an increase in sales and decrease in expenses. That’s marketing!

Then entire post can be read on the Lean Blog.

Mark was a guest on my podcast last year and it resulted in two posts on entirely different subjects.
A Lean Experts Guide to Blogging and Twitter
Mark Graban of the Lean Blog discusses Lean Healthcare

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One of the best things about developing a Marketing Kanban is it allows you to create a separate cadence for each marketing segment. The old saying is Different Strokes for Different Folks. Why should marketing be any different?

The Value Stream Marketing diagram symbolizes exactly how important a cadence is. I use a typical Scrum drawing and the 2 iteration circles to highlight the change in cadence for a target prospect when he nears the buying stage and the present customers that need a different type of cadence.

What is Cadence? Cadence is determined by the quantity and the frequency that a prospect or customer moves through a marketing cycle. In a true Lean Operation, the prospect/customer should set the pace. A mismatched cadence or when you try to force feed your customer usually will disrupt and sometimes even end the marketing cycle. Creating a smooth or level flow is one of the prime reasons that a Marketing Kanban should be used.

When we create our Value Stream for a prospect/customer we like to calculate our normal marketing cycle time. It differs from takt time which is normally associated with Value stream Mapping. First of all it is not exact, it is an average time. Every customer will be somewhat different. However, I think the surprise is you will see a definite average cycle time (there is an element of variation) that the majority of your prospects take. The more a prospect is qualified the more precise you can become with your cycle time or cadence. On the other hand, the likelihood of getting orders will decrease significantly as you move away from this time.

In Lean, a pacemaker point is used so that we can schedule around one point and create a level flow. In a Marketing Kanban, I like to use the constraint or the bottleneck as my control point. You can argue that you have an external constraint, outside of your marketing. If that is true, then the dollars and resources must be allocated appropriately. However, I would argue that there is a constraint within your organizations marketing cycle that is limiting your throughput. I believe that dealing with this constraint is easier, less costly and more efficient than dealing with trying to fill the funnel.

Having a handle on your control point is not the only part of cadence you need to be concerned about. Your marketing cycle should have a rhythm about it! For example, maybe it takes 2 weeks to fill up a webinar or 3 months for a workshop or auto-responders may be more effective over a 8 week cycle versus a 6 week. Cadences can be changed; they may even be different depending on the company size you are dealing with. The first thing you must do is to determine what it is before trying to make it something else. That’s half the battle.

We have discussed cadence in the sense of a prospect/customer moving through the marketing cycle but there is another important function of cadence. In most outbound advertising media we always discuss frequency. You need to be seen or heard on a consistent basis for your advertising message to work. Ad reps used to tell you that you need 3 or 4 times. Now, I hear that you need 7 or 8 times. That really does not surprise me with the amount of noise that is out there. However, we know the shift is taking place to inbound marketing. Inconsistent inbound strategy is not only ineffective but can be damaging to your organization. A consistent strategy that is easily understood throughout the entire organization needs to be deployed for best results. You must develop a certain cadence to it. If you blog 3 times a week, blog 3 times a week. You could even set-up times to Twitter two times a day. I call them Twitter breaks. If you develop a rhythm or cadence to your efforts it will be easier to build a repore with your community.

As I was looking around for a picture or video to include in this post, I ran across this video.

This video is part of the DZone Agile Methodologies Resource Center, sponsored by VersionOne. Click here for additional resources on this topic. In this presentation, Katia Sullivan talks about agile topics like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cadence as well as the communication gap between business managers and developers/IT. Katia Sullivan is the product specialist at VersionOne.  Her expertise is in best practices for agile tooling.

P.S. The take away from this post should be that Cadence is about Consistency and Flow!

Related Posts:
Improve Communication – Have more meetings?
Kanban made easy with Coveys 4Disciplines
Marketing Kanban 102, Work in Process

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Jim Luckman has had the unique experience of leading three separate lean transformations, as a Plant Manager, as a Director of a Research and Development Center, and as a CEO of a small start-up company. During the podcast, we discussed Value Stream Mapping and delved into Value Stream Concepts as they applied to Lean and Agile Software Development. I found it interesting his take on the "Newer" Lean concepts and how they are viewed by a more traditional practitioner.

Jim is the Past President and CEO of iPower Technologies, a company serving the distributed generation market of electrical power. Luckman has worked in the auto industry for 34 years working at Delphi Automotive (formerly part of General Motors). Jim current efforts include leadership coaching, application of lean in R&D and application of lean to software development. He currently coaches companies interested in company-wide lean transformation. Jim is a partner in Lean Transformations Group, LLC

Jim will be the instructor for this LEI Workshop in Indianapolis on June 22nd – Value-Stream Mapping for the Office and Service: This interactive workshop demonstrates how to apply value-stream mapping, a fundamental and critical tool, to address what many companies find difficult to do: making a fundamental change in business processes such as administrative, professional, and transactional activities. You will see how the key elements of lean thinking and value-stream mapping apply to such activities by identifying key processes to tackle, drawing an accurate current-state map of each process, applying lean principles to envision a leaner future-state for each process, and implementing the future-state in a way that can be sustained.

Related Information:
Learning to talk their talk helps you walk your walk!
Lean Rock Stars assembled for Indy Management Workshop
LEI Workshops
6 Lean Management Workshops for Indianapolis
Lean Transformations Group Website: http://lean-transform.com

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