Portfolio Kanban is exactly what it sounds like – applying the Kanban Method to manage work at portfolio level. Essentially, creating a system to manage options: epics, projects or any work at a level where it hasn’t been decomposed by a delivery team for implementation. There isn’t a huge amount of… Read More »Portfolio Kanban and Prioritising with Cost of Delay
On Monday, we described a pull system in a factory and how it differed from a push system often used by software teams. We are following that post with a 10-day series looking at push and pull systems in everyday life, asking what you think and offering our thoughts. Scenario number 4… Read More »Pull or Push #4: The supermarket checkout
On Monday, we described a pull system in a factory and how it differed from a push system often used by software teams. Yesterday we posted the first off our 10-day series looking at push and pull systems in everyday life. We ask what you think, and offer our thoughts. Today’s… Read More »Pull or Push #2: The art gallery
“When is it going to be ready?”, “How long will it take?”. As someone involved in software delivery, you are probably asked these questions or something like them, every day. However you choose to answer the question, you’ve probably taken into consideration the capacity of your team. For most people,… Read More »Increasing Capacity: A Question of Capability
Probabilistic forecasting is an alternative to an estimates based approach. Rather than asking your teams to break down a lot of work up front, and then estimate it, we can use past data generated by the team from the work they’ve already done to extrapolate a forecast of what may happen… Read More »Probabilistic Forecasting
How much information can a triangle give you? Well, if it’s on a CFD (‘Cumulative Flow Diagram’), then it appears to be quite a lot. After sitting in a presentation recently, someone came up to me to ask how changes in WIP, Cycle Time and Delivery Rate alter the shape of… Read More »Little’s Law and CFDs
What is Little’s Law? If you have a stable system (e.g. one-in-one-out), then the average number of customers you have within that system is equal to the average rate of customer arrivals multiplied by the average time a customer spends in the system. That was the law proposed by John… Read More »Little’s Law
So, you want to make progress in 2014? Perhaps you have a new business venture that you want to start? Perhaps you just want to improve yourself? Either way, chances are that you will run out of steam pretty quickly. However, there is hope. I am highly productive and motivated,… Read More »How to get things done
(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
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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