Lean Kanban North America 2016

Transforming an Advertising Agency Using Kanban

Vistaprint transformed its software development teams to Scrum and Kanban, reducing release cycles from 18 months to 3 weeks. But Marketing had to move faster to match this pace. The bottlenecks seemed to be in Creative (the in-house advertising agency). Could Kanban work for Creative? Yes it could!

With a combination of a Kanban system, in-depth training, embedded coaching, lean metrics, and a focus on the agile mindset, we reduced the lead time for the North American email team from 8 weeks to 9 days. The cycle time dropped from 15 days to 4. Late night and weekend work disappeared. The on-time delivery rate soared and quality did not suffer.

This approach is now being used to spread Kanban to other teams in the agency in both the US and Europe. We demonstrated that Kanban works well outside of software. Now we have traction for an enterprise-wide transformation.

In this presentation, we will explain the challenges we faced and the key steps that made this transformation successful. We will also explain our team engagement model.