Kanban

Kanban boards

What is this? “It’s a Kanban board” is the most common answer. It’s not. It might be an “Agile Board” or a “Scrum Board”, but it’s not a Kanban board. Here’s why. Although 看板 (Kanban) has multiple meanings in Japanese, what we (and the people who claim boards like the one… Read More »Kanban boards

New 1-day Kanban bootcamp

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  • 2 min read

We have noticed that interest in the Kanban Method has been growing steadily over the years. We have always resisted creating a Kanban-focused bootcamp because we feel that it is difficult to give a one-approach-fits-all summary of Kanban; we much prefer a tailor-made approach through coaching. However, some of our… Read More »New 1-day Kanban bootcamp

Interview with Mike Burrows

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  • 2 min read

This is the third in our series of interviews interesting people (sometimes loosely) related to our agile and lean world. This week is with Mike Burrows who is the founder of agendashift (tools for Lean-Agile transformation), author of Kanban from the Inside, consultant, trainer and coach. S&K: Explain what you do in… Read More »Interview with Mike Burrows

An Obsession with Labels

Having spent the last 5 years working in retail, and specifically high end fashion, I’ve seen a lot of obsessing over labels. You might expect that of the retail fashion industry, but it seems this obsession with labels has made its way into the software development community too. Using a framework like Scrum is… Read More »An Obsession with Labels

Kanban in the factory

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  • 2 min read

“It’s the oldest working car plant in Europe with an output of 1 car every 68 seconds … 1,000 cars per day. Each car takes 24 hours from start to finish.” Last month, the BBC aired a two-part live show entitled Building Cars Live from the Mini plant in Oxford. It… Read More »Kanban in the factory

User stories reimagined

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

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

Probabilistic Forecasting

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  • 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