Kanban Coaching Professional #
I’m happy to share that I’ve earned the Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) credential from Kanban University.
Download Certificate - KCP ➡️What is the KCP? #
The Kanban Coaching Professional is an advanced-level credential from Kanban University. It goes beyond designing and improving Kanban systems and certifies the ability to coach organizations through evolutionary change using the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM).
The KMP teaches you how Kanban works. The KCP teaches you how to guide an organization through meaningful, lasting transformation: understanding resistance, leveraging influence, and designing change as a series of safe experiments rather than risky big-bang rollouts.
The path to KCP #
Building on my Kanban Management Professional (KMP) certification, I completed two additional courses:
Kanban Maturity Model (KMM): covers how to assess where a team or organization currently stands in terms of process maturity, and how to plan incremental improvements using an Evolutionary Change Canvas. I also learned practical techniques for anticipating resistance and working with influencers to help adopt new practices.
Kanban Coaching (KC): builds on the KMM by adding change management and sociological concepts. It focuses on how to handle cultural friction, work through change plateaus, and use a structured set of steps to increase motivation for adopting new ways of working.
After completing all four courses (KSD, KSI, KMM, and KC), I passed the KCP Credential Exam to earn the certification.
Why this matters for a systems engineer #
Software engineering is fundamentally a team activity. The biggest challenges I face daily aren’t technical, they’re about flow: how work moves through a system of people, how teams coordinate handoffs, and how organizations respond to changing priorities.
The KCP gives me a way to approach those challenges systematically:
- Seeing the system, not just the code. The KMM provides a vocabulary for understanding where a team sits in terms of process maturity, helping identify why things feel chaotic rather than just reacting to symptoms.
- Leading change without authority. The coaching tools give me practical ways to propose and experiment with improvements that respect the existing culture.
- Bridging technical and non-technical teams. The emphasis on sociological factors and resistance patterns gives me better tools for cross-discipline collaboration, something increasingly important at senior levels.
The KCP helps me be a better engineer by making me a better systems thinker, and “systems” here means the human ones, not just the technical ones.
What’s next? #
This certification completes the core Kanban credential path. I’m looking forward to applying these coaching and evolutionary change techniques in my day-to-day work and sharing what I learn along the way.
KCP logo by Kanban University ➡️
