flow

Family flow

by David Lowe
July 24, 2018September 11, 2019
3 min read

“Brush your hair.” “Eat your breakfast.” “Have you brushed your teeth?” “Bag packed?” “Shoes on. Put your shoes on. Come on, put your shoes on. We need to go!” That’s a typical morning when I’m getting the kids ready for school. It’s stressful (more to me than them). It appears that this… Read More »Family flow

Please don’t reduce my queue

by David Lowe
2 Comments
October 12, 2017July 15, 2022
2 min read

I spend most of my time talking to people about identifying bottlenecks in their system so they can improve the flow of work passing through it. It doesn’t matter whether it is building software, creating physical tools, or writing policy within government. However, a recent article about a theme park… Read More »Please don’t reduce my queue

Back from the brink

by David Lowe
2 Comments
March 29, 2017July 15, 2022
4 min read

“If you carry on like this, you are very likely to have a heart attack in the next 5 to 10 years” ~ John That’s the kind of message that hits home. John’s argument as to why he thought this was very convincing: if I didn’t change my actions, my… Read More »Back from the brink

Portfolio Kanban and Prioritising with Cost of Delay

by James Wyllie
January 23, 2017January 23, 2017
3 min read

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

User stories reimagined

by David Lowe
1 Comment
May 25, 2015May 19, 2015
3 min read

One of the key practices of Anderson’s Kanban Method is “visualise the workflow”. Many people insist that we’ve been doing this from the early years of Scrum via Scrum boards. However, I suggest that most teams are only just scratching the surface of what is possible, and many need a… Read More »User stories reimagined

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

Increasing Capacity: A Question of Capability

by James Wyllie
1 Comment
March 31, 2015July 15, 2022
2 min read

“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

Kanban Reports

by David Lowe
1 Comment
November 19, 2013September 1, 2015
4 min read

This blog post is an update to the original post from November 2013 Don’t get me wrong, I prefer story points and velocity to masses of up-front analysis and estimation. But I feel that Kanban goes one step further and employs maths as a basis for its estimates. Unlike financial… Read More »Kanban Reports

What is Lean?

by David Lowe
June 14, 2013May 28, 2014
4 min read

“Lean” was first referred to in “The Machine That Changed the World” – a book written in the 1980s by a group of MIT researchers who had spent years studying the global automobile industry. It was used to describe management practices then being used at Toyota. Rather than focus on… Read More »What is Lean?