The short version Based on experience helping organizations go agile in the last few years, an emerging attractor for healthier more sustainable results seems to be the “Starting with Managers” pattern. This is a “training wheels” pattern which seeks fastest learning of the managers in the organization what going towards an agile flow feels like …
After a serious break from Kanban Mechanics posts, here is one for you Kanban System Designers/Practitioners out there… I’ve recently become a fan of the “Virtual Horizontal Swimming Lanes” style of Electronic Kanban Boards. These Boards don’t use physical horizontal lanes but instead use dynamic and easy filtering to show virtual lanes. Specifically I helped …
Does adapting agile methods increase the chances of successful adoption and lasting change for the organization? If you’ve read a few of my blog posts you will know my opinion is a strong “of course!” I believe we need to be agile about how we do agile. But it would be nice to have some …
Paying attention to Management attention I’ve been talking recently about the challenges of keeping sustainable sticky Continuous Improvement programs. An aspect I’ve mentioned but not emphasized enough is the lack of management attention. In this blog post I will focus on why management attention is so important in improvement programs, why is it lacking and …
Background I recently had a couple of weeks with a few activities related to “Agile Testing”. “Agile Testing” for those not familiar with it is the name we give to the set of thinking guidelines, principles and practices that help run the testing aspects of product development/maintenance in a more effective way under an Agile …
How can we make promises we can keep without a commitment to the sprint content? So I convinced you that the Scrum Sprint Commitment is not such a great idea. I convinced you it is mainly there for learning. You want to move to a commitment to try to meet the forecast instead of committing …
Disclaimer – I’m a well-known Scrum Sprint Commitment basher. But in the last few weeks especially while processing the Lean Conference Boston Keynote by Steven Spear I have a fresh perspective I wanted to share. There is no improvement without learning One of Spear’s key points was that there is no improvement without learning. There is …
I want to talk about a kanban system design issue today. Do we need a way to portray full stack ranking of cards throughout a kanban system or is it enough to see stack ranking per lane ? To elaborate – sometimes it feels necessary to convey the priority of cards and have a way …
As I prepare to check out from the Boston Seaport Hotel which was the venue of this year’s LSSC conference (and did a magnificent job hosting us!), here are my highlights/impressions of the conference. The buzzword of the conference seems to have been “Lean Startup”. It permeated into many talks (including mine) in two main …
Lets try to summarize real quick what we came up with in a short lean coffee session about this today in LSSC12. Lean Startup for Change is applying the concepts of Lean Startup to Change programs. It comes real handy when you have a complex environment where you don’t know exactly what will work for …