Introduction Don Reinertsen frequently talks about how surprised teams are when they first try to quantify the cost of delay on one of their projects/programs and an exercise he runs to help surface the wide range of intuitive estimates of the cost of delay amongst the team and how a little bit of analysis can …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I’ve been very busy the last few months working with clients and the next months don’t look any better (Not complaining though…). As a result I need to choose very carefully which conferences to attend. As usual, I only go to conferences I’m speaking at. But this year I went even further and dramatically limited …
Context This post is inspired by my experience trying to help organizations make agile teams work in real life. It is heavily inspired or can even be called a revision of a post from a couple of years ago on the Lean/Kanban approach to teams. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find …
Amazingly enough, it has been 9 years since I started blogging, and about 5 years since I started blogging as an agile coach at AgileSparks. I think it is about time to hear what the readers think works well on this blog, what can be improved, and how useful it is to them. Retrospective, Inspect …
Previously on “The Agile Journey”… So some time ago – maybe months or years – you decided to go for Lean/Agile. You went ahead and started to use Scrum/Kanban to break the waterfall and achieve a more agile operation. These were exciting times. First, that time of making sure you understand what you are trying …
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 & …
A main theme of my work and thoughts recently has been Pull-based change. I noticed that I don’t have one place that I can refer people to for my work on this subject. Until I write a book about it, here are some links: Most Recently – Bringing invitations into SAFe™ A series on the …