Kanban Training on Prezi I decided to get back to Prezi as an alternative to Powerpoint. Its capabilities seem to be a good match for my kind of materials - Visuals of boards, charts, etc. where you want to zoom in on details, show flows, etc. A specific opportunity is coming up that is making that even a better idea, so I finally took the plunge 2 years after my last real use of Prezi I dove in again. So much fun, [...]
I recently worked on some measures/metrics that help answer the question "How effective is our product management process, and how is it contributing/affecting the overall performance of our product development line" Here are some slides from slideshare about the topic. I might write it up in a more elaborate form in the future. If there are specific questions about concepts I mentioned, mention it in a comment (or on twitter or something) and I might write up a specific area. [...]
Our coaching team at agilesparks runs into this question a lot. Many of the teams we are working with are familiar with Scrum and using it. Other teams are just now going into Scrum. Since kanban is becoming a hot buzzword, we often get asked - so what is this kanban thing? How is it related to Scrum? We needed a good answer, that depends on the context, the amount of time you have to answer, and the maturity [...]
An interesting question was raised to one of our coaches at Agilesparks. Question: Isn't it more efficient to wait till the end of the release and then all together handle all the bugs? One of us answered that same like you probably prefer to answer emails throughout the day rather than at the end, you want to deal with bugs during the sprints. I of course fully agree that you need to deal with bugs during the sprint/release, or in [...]
One of the key questions project managers and senior management in general ask themselves and their teams on an ongoing basis is - "Are we on track to deliver the scope we committed to, on time". In some environments "on budget" is added to the question. If you are talking about a Release Scope, the answers are quite similar whether you're doing Scrum or Kanban. If you don't care too much about the budget aspects, a Release Burnup can show you the [...]
A lot of our clients at AgileSparks ask us how to measure their effectiveness. Some of them are already using Agile styles of product development, others are not yet there, and another important variant is the Enterprise with mixed ways of doing things, that wants to get more visibility, and use measures as a way to drive towards improvement. As we all know, we need to be very careful what we measure, and on top of that a lot of measurements [...]
The more experience I get with Kanban, and the more I talk about it with people, I see that one of the main challenges is maintaining some form of goal-driven cadence that energizes the team. If every one of your Kanban Cards/Stories is an independent goal (e.g. a support environment) its easy to connect to the business and there's usually an SLA to energize you. If you are working in an environment where the business goals are quite big, and [...]
A Confession. While I'm a great fan of using SPC charts to explore specific cycle times and reduce variation / continuously improve a Kanban System (a great blog by benjamin mitchell), I'm only seeing preliminary results in the field with teams I'm coaching. The main reasons are lack of tooling, lack of incentive to manually manage this, and the fact that teams are not yet mature enough. I'm hoping this will change in the near future. With that in mind, a [...]
Today I delivered the first public Kanban workshop for managers in Israel The feedback was great overall, and there is a lot of interest in creating a community to keep taking this forward. We'll see how to do that In the meantime see some pictures from the event over at agilesparks, thanks to Gil from Agilesparks for the photography!