Who would have thought Personal Kanban would end up being the counter-measure to stalled Kaizen / Continuous Improvement?

By |2012-07-31T00:37:02-04:00July 31, 2012|Blog, Change Management, Management, Personal Kanban|

Paying attention to Management attention I've been talking recently about the challenges of keeping sustainable sticky Continuous Improvement programs. An aspect I've mentioned but not emphasized enough is the lack of management attention. In this blog post I will focus on why management attention is so important in improvement programs, why is it lacking and what might we do about it. Why we need management attention Basically to change the system of work you need the attention of people that [...]

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How does the performance objectives process change in a Lean/Agile world?

By |2012-01-26T14:37:29-05:00January 26, 2012|Agile, Management|

Seems like every January I get questions from HR leaders in organizations I'm working with that go something like this - "We are working on the yearly performance objectives process, and we were wondering whether it needs to change in an agile environment?" The main evolution I see in the Performance management process is leaning towards measuring up and across as well as focusing on capabilities improvement rather than a set of concrete product deliverables specified up front. Measuring up [...]

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“We are already Lean/Agile” – Really?

By |2012-01-20T20:34:33-05:00January 20, 2012|Agile, Change Management, Management|

These days more and more organizations think they are Agile A couple of years ago when you talked to people about agile a common response "why should we", "it won't work here", or "so this is the new fad? What will come next?" Times have changed. And a sign of the fact that agile is becoming more mainstream is that it being diluted and a common response these days is "but we are already agile!". I want to share a [...]

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Lean/Kanban approach to Teams

By |2011-10-22T08:38:42-04:00October 22, 2011|Agile, Blog, Export, kanban|

To Team or not to Team? If you look at the definition of Kanban or Lean, you wouldn't find teams anywhere there. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams" Scrum is quite clear about the topic (Quoting the Scrum Guide 2011) "Scrum Teams are self-organizing and cross-functional. Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others outside the team. Cross-functional teams [...]

Scrum Sprint Commitment Rant

By |2011-10-13T10:55:09-04:00October 13, 2011|kanban, Metrics, Scrum|

Going on a Rant If there's one thing that makes me mad whenever I see it is teams abusing the commitment concept in scrum. I've been on a rampage against dysfunctional sprint commitments for a while now, but lately my thoughts have crystalized a bit, especially when I had a chance to discuss this with Jim benson, Alan Shalloway, Chris Hefley and Jon Terry last week at Lean Kanban Benelux 2011. Background So what is the problem? Well quite often [...]

Patterns for getting to a lower WIP level in a system – The Freeze, No New Work, Limit Later, and some Mashups…

By |2011-07-30T08:59:45-04:00July 30, 2011|Blog, Export, kanban|

Some of us have the luxury of designing processes for greenfield systems meaning there is no history/legacy to deal with. Typically though, we are dealing with Brownfield/Legacy systems - This usually means there is some work in the system already, there are outstanding commitments, and some existing queues between steps in our processes. I'm working with several clients that decided to start using a Kanban system to manage their work, and believe Limited Work in Process is key to improving [...]

Speaking in Lean Kanban Conferences in Europe Oct 2011

By |2011-07-10T20:49:34-04:00July 10, 2011|Events|

I was invited to speak in two Lean Kanban conferences taking place in Europe this fall. I'm very excited about both those conferences. The speakers list is still not closed, but is very interesting on both of them, and it will also be an opportunity to hear case studies from the local region and meet practitioners. The topics for my talks are not finalized yet, I'll update more as we close those details. Looking forward to meeting European readers of the [...]

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LSSC11 – My impressions/takeaways

By |2011-05-15T15:24:51-04:00May 15, 2011|Blog, kanban|

Impressions Keynotes - The Keynote by Chet Richards was AMAZING. He is a great speaker, and his content was just right for opening the LSSC conference. He had tough competition with David Snowden talking about Complexity, so instead of chosing the best keynote, I'm mainly glad we could enjoy both. Snowden's keynote was tougher to digest, and I think it will take me time to really bring myself to the level of consciously applying ideas from Snowden's Cynefin in my day-to-day work. [...]

Reasons to come early to conferences, or at least to LSSC Lean Software and Systems Conferences

By |2011-05-04T16:54:02-04:00May 4, 2011|kanban|

Its early wednesday, I'm at Long Beach for LSSC11 - the main US conference for the Lean Software Systems Consortium also at LimitedWIPSociety.org - the community practicing and leading Lean and Kanban in software development. The main conference starts this morning and my talk is this afternoon, but so much has happened already, I'm really glad I arrived early. So what are the reasons to arrive early to LSSC conferences? Breaking Bread Socializing with other participants - Starting monday afternoon and [...]

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