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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
(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 …
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 …
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 …
In a previous post I started talking about the ratio between Dev and Test, and promised to revisit how it looks like in an Agile/Kanban environment. Whenever I talk to teams/managers about Kanban, whether as part of a workshop, or with a team actually practicing Kanban, the issue of testing as the bottleneck surfaces quite …
One of the questions I’m asked quite frequently is what is the right ratio between developers and testers. A variant on that question is what I typically see in other organizations as the ratio. Well lets answer the second variant and then try to deal with the first. Typically what we see in agilesparks customers …
It seems like new uses for Kanban are cropping up every day. One of those ideas is to use Kanban in order to drive Continuous Improvement efforts.