Kanban

Actionable Agile Analytics

by David Lowe
1 Comment
June 29, 2015June 30, 2015
5 min read

In my recent post, I talked about Dan Vacanti’s take on Kanban charts. Some of his beliefs mean that our legacy charts are no longer workable. So what can we use to track dates, view scatterplots, check arrival vs departure rates, etc? Vacanti’s company has built a tool called ActionableAgile… Read More »Actionable Agile Analytics

We’ve been doing it all wrong!

by David Lowe
2 Comments
June 22, 2015June 17, 2015
4 min read

I can hear myself saying it now: “If you count up the number of work items in each column, and keep a record of each item’s start and end date, then you can create a CFD [Cumulative Flow Diagram], control chart and histogram”. Apparently I was wrong. Apparently nearly all… Read More »We’ve been doing it all wrong!

Flow Efficiency

by David Lowe
June 1, 2015June 1, 2015
2 min read

What percentage of your team’s time is actually spent working on the items that are ‘in progress’? 70%? 75%? 80%? Some suggest that it is as low as 2% and that 40% is the most that’s been observed. This is the world of flow efficiency. Originating from the manufacturing industry,… Read More »Flow Efficiency

Thinking in systems

by James Wyllie
May 18, 2015July 15, 2022
2 min read

I’ve recently been involved in delivering a number of new services designed to replace a long serving monolithic web application. Sound familiar? The move to a service oriented architecture can be described, for many reasons, as a good thing. However, care needs to be taken to ensure that the dependencies… Read More »Thinking in systems

CFD plugin for Trello

by David Lowe
8 Comments
April 27, 2015
2 min read

I’ve been using Trello quite a lot recently: it seems to be the tracking tool of choice for many because it is lightweight, simple to use and free. But with simplicity comes a lack of features. Unlike other systems (e.g. LeanKit and Jira), it doesn’t have metrics such as cumulative… Read More »CFD plugin for Trello

Is it ever okay to fully load a system?

by Jiten Vara
2 Comments
April 13, 2015
3 min read

Is there ever a time when it is okay to not limit your work in progress or ever a time when it is okay to fully load your system? Most people’s answer would be “probably not”. In most circumstances that would be the correct answer. We see the consequences of… Read More »Is it ever okay to fully load a system?

Are we slacking enough?

by Jiten Vara
March 2, 2015March 2, 2015
3 min read

The team that I am currently working with is approaching the end of the sprint. After the last stand up, conversation turned to taking on more product backlog items before the sprint finishes, as the team felt like they had some spare time, or, slack. Most of the team felt strongly… Read More »Are we slacking enough?

Probabilistic Forecasting

by James Wyllie
February 23, 2015September 16, 2015
3 min read

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

Health checks

by David Lowe
7 Comments
January 12, 2015July 15, 2022
2 min read

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

Scrum & Kanban playlist

by David Lowe
December 22, 2014December 16, 2014
1 min read

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