Working towards Sustainable Pace in Scrum, SAFe and Kanban

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-02T13:07:05-05:00December 6, 2021|kanban, SAFe, Scrum|

Aiming towards Sustainable Pace“Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” — The Agile Manifesto Principle“programmers or software developers should not work more than 40 hour weeks, and if there is overtime one week, that the next week should not include more overtime.” — Extreme ProgrammingAn unsustainable pace is unhealthy. It contributes to burnout, quality issues, and unpredictable results.If you are an agile leader — do you know whether your teams are currently operating at [...]

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Scaling Scrum with Nexus and Kanban

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:20:54-05:00September 11, 2020|kanban, Nexus|

Everybody wants to Scale ScrumSo you have a couple of Scrum Teams that are working in adjacent areas and you’re starting to face some challenges in delivering value in a coordinated integrative way. This is more or less the time you started searching for “scaling agile” “scaling scrum” and exploring your options. Generally, one approach will be to add some scaling principles and practices. Another approach would be to try and refactor your organization/group so the teams actually don’t need each [...]

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Improving your SAFe™ Implementation with some additional Flow metrics

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:23:04-05:00October 25, 2018|kanban, SAFe|

The PremiseA year ago Scrum.org, in collaboration with Daniel Vacanti and myself, published the Kanban Guide For Scrum Teams, a guide that is aimed at helping Scrum Teams take advantage of Kanban/Flow principles and practices. (I wrote an earlier blog post about understanding the guide)SAFe™ has included Kanban at all levels since version 4.0. Some basic guidance about Kanban is included in most if not all SAFe curriculums. Can a SAFe practitioner learn anything from the Kanban Guide For Scrum [...]

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Scrum and Kanban — Stronger Together

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:26:34-05:00June 30, 2017|kanban, Scrum|

Over the years we at AgileSparks have been leading the charge when it comes to creating mashups and hybrids of approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, whatever. Mashups and hybrids can be very attractive as they can be an excuse for taking what you like from each approach and leaving behind the hard stuff. In mashing up approaches you need to make sure whatever set of practices you end up with is cohesive and effective. Coming up with the [...]

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A Kanban for Marketing Board Example

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:27:44-05:00April 28, 2017|Agile Marketing, kanban|

Here is an example of a fairly typical Marketing Kanban board which can be useful for marketing teams that are taking their first steps towards implementing agile marketing in practice using kanban.You can print it out and use it as a source of ideas & inspiration as you evolve your own board.It is a slightly modified version of Henrik Kniberg’s Kanban Kick-Start Example that he graciously shared using a creative-commons license. Why do we need a marketing version you ask? [...]

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Addressing some myths and misconceptions people have when considering Kanban

By Yuval Yeret|2014-11-12T22:19:13-05:00November 12, 2014|kanban|

I frequently get contacted by people who like Kanban in general but are worried that it might not be a good fit for their context. In some cases the concern is legit but in many others it is just a result of basic misunderstanding of Kanban. We need to figure out why this happens so often but in the meantime here is a short FAQ: Q: Is Kanban just for ongoing maintenance or also complex product development? A: Short answer [...]

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How to limit WIP when you cannot block arriving work requests?

By Yuval Yeret|2014-11-05T11:24:26-05:00November 5, 2014|kanban|

A concern that comes up frequently when you start talking about applying a WIP limit is: “So, what I understand from you is that at some point you will block incoming work requests if the WIP limit is reached, yes? Well, we cannot do that. We cannot tell people we will not work on their items. That will not fly around here”. I think that is a reasonable concern. In Don Reinertsen’s Lean Product Development workshop this week in Paris [...]

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How to replace the timebox-based motivation when using Kanban/ScrumBan

By Yuval Yeret|2014-09-30T11:57:27-04:00September 30, 2014|Blog, kanban, ScrumBan|

I recently pointed a customer to a discussion around motivation when using Kanban compared to Scrum and other timebox-driven approaches. This blog post is a slightly edited version of my comments on that discussion, since I find myself getting into similar discussions quite frequently. The question/context originally posed by Victor on kanbandev was: "We kind of dropped our previous Scrum process (or rather we decided to pay less attention to it because it was becoming less relevant once Kanban was in [...]

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Do Craig Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior really mean we always need to start with a structural change? What do they say about starting with Kanban?

By Yuval Yeret|2014-06-14T08:14:23-04:00June 14, 2014|Blog, Change Management, kanban, Scrum|

I've been following Craig Larman's work for a while now. I find the books he wrote with Bas Vodde on scaling agile to be very insightful and actionable. I recently discovered Craig's "Laws of Organizational Behavior": 1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures. 2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the [...]

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Helping with Kanban – Thoughts from reading Helping by Edgar Schein

By Yuval Yeret|2014-03-29T09:31:28-04:00March 29, 2014|Book Reviews, Change Management, kanban|

I recently read Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help by Edgar Schein (actually I listened to it on Audible and then read it again on kindle to better process/digest). I can highly recommend it if you are interested in ways to become a more helpful consultant, manager, person - one who is able to actually help people/organizations rather than just dispense advice/suggestions. I'm not doing a full review of the book here but there are a couple of [...]

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