Blog

MMF driven sprints in a Kanban world

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 …

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Kanban early warning using a predictive variant of SPC

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 …

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Why I think slack is highly important during an Agile/Kanban transition

(Note, this post is about slack the concept not Slack the collaboration platform. Though Slack the platform is great as well) Actually, the title is wrong. I think slack is highly important during any change initiative where you expect continuous improvement of the process and practices. The importance of slack is not new. Not in …

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The Ant and the Grasshopper – Application for product development

I’m sure everyone is familiar with some version of the The Ant and the Grasshopper (or הצרצר_והנמלה) While talking to a Product Manager today, I was asked “How come we always end up without QA resources at the end of the version” and was reminded of this tale. Most projects behave like the Grasshopper. Focusing on …

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Can lanes be skipped in a kanban board?

A question in a recent kanban workshop was how to deal with the fact that some work has different workflow than others For example: Features need to go to testing after implementation Escalation cases without patches need to go to support for returning to the customer after implementation and that’s it Escalation cases with a …

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