There are lots of ‘health check models’ out there. Most of them attempt to summarise and visualise how teams are doing, and seek areas of improvements. They are sometimes run by managers, sometimes by coaches, sometimes by teams in workshops. Over the years, I have discarded approaches that ‘score’ teams… Read More »Health checks
It’s time to throw out that Christmas CD. Seriously, I don’t want to listen to Lennon’s So This Is Christmas ever again. The alternative? Our tongue-in-cheek agile and lean-related playlist. It was born during lunch at this year’s Kanban retreat in Lisbon. Even Flow by Pearl Jam was an early… Read More »Scrum & Kanban playlist
In western societies we read from left to right. We are conditioned to look to the top left first. During a recent stand up, a team member pointed out that our kanban board asks us to do almost the opposite. Our work is pulled from left to right. Those work items that are closest… Read More »Working Left to Right
The Agile and Lean communities love an acronym, but will settle for an initialism if they have to. For clarification, an acronym is when a word is formed from the initial letters of words in a phrase, and is then pronounced as a separate word (for example, BAFTA or WYSIWYG).… Read More »Acronym Quiz
“Have you read The Goal by Eli Goldratt? If not, you’re in for a treat.” This was a statement made by Chris Young at LKUK13 which, although it was said about every book he mentioned, was very true. I was in for a treat. Although it was written nearly 30 years… Read More »The Goal
When I first started looking into Kanban, I thought I understood what Lead Time, WIP and Throughput Rate meant. I discussed how to calculate them, use them and even produced a video explaining why limiting WIP makes sense referring to them. Then I got told by a bunch of experts… Read More »Kanban Terminology
(updated with revised video on 7 October 2013) When I first got into Kanban, I really struggled to get my head around why limiting work in progress (WIP) made sense. The ‘experts’ were telling me that, by reducing the amount of work we were doing, we’d also reduce the time… Read More »Why limiting WIP makes sense
I’m convinced that Kanban works very well for service desks and other response-based teams. For these teams, planning two weeks’ work up front just doesn’t make sense. Similarly, I can see why people might think that Scrum works best for projects: iterations give great visibility and regular milestones at which… Read More »Scrum or Kanban?
In 2004 I went to a friend’s house for dinner and she served up what can only be described as “a disgusting mush”. This mush was apparently risotto. From that moment on, I was risotto’s biggest opponent. I fought against it whenever it appeared on menus. It was, in my… Read More »Kanban risotto
Until I started focusing on how much our team was working on at any one time (i.e. Work In Progress or “WIP”), as a result of us using Kanban, I didn’t realise just how much of our world is affected by poor flow and how Kanban could help us in… Read More »Why multi-tasking is for losers
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