קנבן

Check out a Prezi for one of my Kanban Training workshops

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 …

Read more

Want to improve effectiveness of Product Management? Here are some ideas for metrics to look at

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 …

Read more

Want my elevator-pitch answer to what is Kanban for a Scrum rookie?

  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 …

Read more

If productivity experts tell me to keep email closed most of the day – why shouldn’t I avoid looking at defects for most of the release?

Isn’t it more efficient to wait till the end of the release and then all together handle all the bugs? One way to think about it is that you probably prefer to answer emails throughout the day rather than at the end; you want to deal with bugs during the sprints. Of course, I fully …

Read more

Encouraging Feature-level progress tracking in Kanban

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 …

Read more

Can we PLEASE have some simple measures for our Product Development group?

A lot of my clients ask me 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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more