Protected: Don’t just limit WIP – optimize it
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The Kanban Perspective on Teams
The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we’re talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. If you look at the definition of Kanban or Lean, you wouldn’t find teams …
Business Efficiency? Watch the Ball, not the Player
In football, the team that wins is the one that gets the ball in the other team’s goal most times. Not the one that runs the most. What matters most is what is happening to the ball. So, we need to watch the ball, not the player. Business is no different. In Knowledge Work what …
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Don’t Be a Ditka
Or, Can You Prioritize Your Way to Optimizing Value?Or, CD3 is Bollocks TL;DR: CD3 is often touted as a prioritization/sequencing method used to help an organization maximize its value delivery. However, CD3 requires a specific set of assumptions to be true in order to provide an optimal result. Those assumptions are simply not valid in …
Ticket Size Does Not Matter
In practically every training class and consultancy work we do in Actineo there are two ideas that someone will bring up at some point: Ticket size matters Tickets need to be of the same size To me, those are two myths.
4 Key Flow Metrics and how to use them in Scrum’s events
In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the Professional Scrum with Kanban workshop, we introduce 4 key flow metrics that we believe Scrum teams can use to improve their flow:
Basketball, Baseball and Agile Teams
Imagine that we are setting up a world basketball tournament. You are given first pick to draft players for your team and you end up with the line up in the picture below –
Conway Is Killing You And Little Is Helping
Conway’s Law In 1968, Melvin Conway wrote the paper “How Do Committees Invent”. One of his observations in that paper (among numerous interesting ones) was declared Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states — Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of …
Scaling without scaling
Doing more without getting more I work for a corporate IT department as a development manager. We are a company that grew fast, kept up with some things and are seriously behind on others and, of course, have way more requested of us than even 2 departments of our size could complete. No one can endlessly hire …
Theory 101: Five Focusing Steps of TOC
The book “The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt took me by surprise. I had forgotten by the time I got around to listening to the audiobook that it was a novel. I just knew I needed to read Goldratt and was starting with his first book. Despite its initial 90’s …