The team at Nulogy was faced with the challenge of a new change management. They turned to Nave to come up with the most consistent approach possible.
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Nulogy, a Toronto-based supply chain management platform, adopted Kanban in 2020 to better manage its product development workflow. One of the earliest challenges the company faced was managing the way they track performance metrics.
Paul Satkunasingam, Software Development Manager at Nulogy, explains: “All too often, we would change what we’re tracking and how we want to track it.”
Standardized Metrics and Consistent Storytelling
To address this problem, Nulogy implemented Nave, a Kanban analytics tool. According to Paul, Nave has helped the team achieve a standardized set of metrics for tracking product development across all their solutions.
“This year, starting in 2023, I feel like we finally got to a place where our data is very clean,” Paul said. “We defined a standardized set of fields. We call them Product Development Metrics and use them across all the solutions that we build to have a more consistent way of storytelling.”
Paul regularly checks Nave’s dashboards to see how his team’s flow metrics change.
“We use Nave to track metrics such as cycle time, throughput, and work in progress to understand where we spend the most time and where our interruptions are coming from,” Paul says.
For example, when he realized that half of his team’s throughput comes from unexpected work, Paul started to ask questions such as “why is unplanned work at large?” He then used Nave to filter down the unplanned items and breaks them down by work type to see where the majority of interruptions come from. This helps him have discussions with other departments to find ways to mitigate these interruptions.
Paul uses Nave’s Throughput Run Chart to identify the interruptions that are preventing his team from achieving a more predictable delivery.
Paul and his team then run experiments to drive down these interruptions.
For example, they might create smaller work items or work toward daily deliverables to reduce work in progress.
Implementing Changes to Optimize the Flow of Work
By using Nave to raise questions about their performance, Paul and his team are able to identify areas for improvement and implement changes to optimize their workflow.
Nulogy also uses Nave to facilitate team meetings and corporate KPI reviews. Teams collect data from Nave and feed it into their metrics attainment spreadsheet to set targets and monitor progress.
“We also have a retrospective that happens every two weeks — just to see how the team is doing, what is and isn’t working for them. And we use Nave to support the topics that we discuss.”
Taking a Step Back to Define Success
Paul believes that, to effectively use data, it’s important to identify what metrics to measure and the impact they will have on the company’s performance.
“A lot of the times, we have discussions around goals but they don’t mean anything unless they’re measurable,” he says. “Data without a story is just numbers. So it’s about connecting different departments through data. For example, capturing adoption metrics and linking them back to sales or marketing targets — that’s what drives the business forward.”
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I hope Paul’s story resonated with you and gave you something to think about in terms of your own goals. Thank you for tuning in with me today, and I look forward to seeing you next Tuesday, same time and place, for more insight-packed managerial goodness. Bye for now!
