ESP - ENTERPRISE SERVICES PLANNING

Enterprise Services Planning

(five-day modular training program)

Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) is a framework of tools that leaders of 21st Century knowledge-work enterprises can apply to their strategic and capacity planning. ESP is often described as the equivalent of MRP for a professional services business. Such businesses employ many educated professionals, who think for a living, perform largely invisible work, and deliver mostly intangible products and services to customers.

Such businesses are increasingly exposed to VUCA - the conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. It is often futile, under such condition, to plan specific results, deliverables, and milestones. The VUCA reality quickly tosses such plans out of the window. Does this sound like your enterprise? ESP can help! What you can do is, plan the capacity of your services to sense, respond and deliver the right levels of service that meet customers' purpose. You can plan the mechanisms of feedback to keep your network of services balanced and capable to execute your strategy. You can plan to avoid risks your enterprise can't take and to manage the risks it chooses to take. That's what we mean by "planning."

ESP complements the delivery capabilities generated by Kanban "from the middle" and agile approaches "from the bottom up" and connects them "at the top" with the models and tools you need to manage on enterprise level.

Is Enterprise Services Planning the Right Training For Me?

Yes - if you are a leader/executive taking responsibility for your company’s strategic decisions

Yes - if you a manager responsible for design, implementation and/or delivery of products and services to your company's customers -- you manage one service or a network of such services

Yes - if you are an improvement consultant or coach responsible for pragmatic actionable advice to such executives and managers

What Will I Learn from ESP Training?

(This is a brief overview. The detailed agenda is near the bottom of the page.)

EXECUTIVE TRACK (DAYS 1 AND 2)

Overview of strategy

Organizational risk

Fitness for purpose

Custom risk assessment frameworks

Alignment of strategy and capability

Survivability assessment

Sample takeaways:

"Our strategy reviews are dominated by competitive analysis. The Fit-for-Purpose gives us a strategic opportunity"

"Love the risk assessment frameworks. We should implement them right away"

"Strategy-capability alignment is very powerful. We now see what capabilities we need to invest in to do better in the business we're in"

PRODUCT MANAGER TRACK (EXIT: MIDDLE OF DAY 4)

Executive Track material plus:

Cost of delay

Real options

Demand shaping

Capacity allocation

Risk hedging

Portfolio Kanban

Sample takeaways:

"I didn't realize there are so many options for managing demand and risks"

"Our "portfolio" is just a large collection of projects and work-in-process. We can now turn it into a tool to help us decide which risks to take and how to manage those risks."

EXPERT TRACK (WHOLE WEEK)

Executive Track and Product Manager's Track material plus:

Delivery and project forecasting

Liquidity and volatility

Scaling

Working with irrefutable demand

Managing dependencies

Dynamic capacity reservation systems

Sample takeaways:

"Dependencies are a big problem in our large enterprise. Wishing they'd go away isn't helpful. We've learned at least a dozen new options how to manage them better"

"It was extremely helpful to learn about forecasting and dynamic reservation systems"

Which Track Should I Take? What Prior Knowledge or Experience Is Required?

Executives: the Executive Track. No prior training needed. It usually helps if you're accompanied by a trusted advisor/coach or one of your managers who has completed Kanban System Design (KMP I) training.

Product managers: the Product Manager Track. The additional day and a half will give you some practical tools and the right level of detail beyond the Executive Track. We'll spare you some difficult "technical" topics back-loaded to Days 4 & 5. Attending together with a colleague-manager who has completed Kanban System Design (KMP I) training may help.

Managers, consultants and coaches: the Expert Track. Completion of Kanban System Design (KMP I) training and relevant experience is required. Completion of Kanban Management Professional (KMP II) training is ideal.

ONE-DAY ESP CLASSES

You can also take a "lite" approach to Enterprise Services Planning (ESP) with the help of these four distinct one-day classes. Each class focuses on just one topic:

How to manage large backlogs? - ESP offers scheduling, sequencing, and selection techniques and custom risk assessment frameworks

How to manage dependencies in my enterprise? - ESP offers many options, based on better understanding of flow and risk

How to write better requirements? - with the help of the Fit-for-Purpose (F4P) framework

How to forecast service deliveries and projects? - ESP gives you clear logic and sensible math

One-day ESP classes will be offered starting in the second half of 2019.

Who Is Teaching?

Alexei Zheglov - he is one of the key contributors to ESP and has more experience applying and teaching it than anyone except the ESP originator David J Anderson. Alexei is a co-author of the new business book, Fit-for-Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers.

Formalities

Participants receive standard Lean Kanban University (LKU) certificates of class completion.

Substitutions of participants are allowed anytime until the start of the class

Please see the registration pages for pricing and refund policies

The organizer reserves the right to cancel classes if registrations are insufficient

Agenda

APPROACH

The ESP training approach is not to impart large bodies of knowledge or complicated process solutions for you to implement. Instead, we bring in stories and exercises to give you many opportunities to reflect and discover options for what you could be managing differently and better in your enterprise. Like all of the Lean Kanban curriculum was created through collaboration of leading experts and validated many training classes around the world. As a result, you get pragmatic, actionable guidance you can implement in your organization next week - because it doesn't require permission, a large budget or getting others to change.

DAILY SCHEDULE

Each day includes four intensive 90-minute sessions. With proper breaks between the "quarters" as well as the lunch breaks, it takes about eight hours to complete each day's agenda. Here's the approximate schedule:

9:00-10:30 Class session (Q1)

10:30-11:00 Break

11:00-12:30 Class session (Q2)

12:30-1:30 Lunch

1:30-3:00 Class session (Q3)

3:00-3:30 Break

3:30-5:00 Class session (Q4)

SYLLABUS

Here's the approximate day-to-day agenda of the five days of Enterprise Services Planning training.

Q1 Introductions, Overview of strategy

Q2 Organizational risk categorization, corporate identity, fragility, resilience, robustness, antifragility, organizational dilemma

Q3 Fit-for-Purpose framework: core concepts

Q4 Fit-for-Purpose framework: managing for F4P, F4P cards and box scores, from insights to action, integrations

Q5 Custom risk assessment frameworks: visualizing risks, cost of delay, sequencing

Q6 Custom risk assessment frameworks: design your own

Q7 Alignment of strategy and capability

Q8 Strategy review and survivability assessment

Executive Track ends

Q9 Cost of delay in depth: market payoff functions, delay cost functions, probable cost of delay in starting, urgency, optimal start date and class of service guidance

Q10 Real options, using options to manage under conditions of uncertainty, implications of uncertainty and options on organizational design

Q11 Embedded options, complex sequencing, custom risk assessment frameworks in more depth, shaping demand with policy

Q12 Shaping demand with capacity allocation

Q13 Risk hedging, dynamic WIP constraints, prioritizing market segments

Q14 Portfolio Kanban

Product Manager Track ends

Q15 Mathematical properties of time in process, probabilistic forecasting of deliveries and projects

Q16 Labour pool liquidity, system liquidity

Q17 Volatility, turbulence, squeezes, Fit-for-Purpose case study, scaling, contrasting approaches to managing dependencies

Q18 Enabling capacity planning with Kanban cadences, options for dealing with irrefutable demand

Q19 Dependencies: summarizing various types of dependencies and various options for managing them (learned throughout the class)

Q20 Dynamic capacity reservation systems