Understanding Kanban

The Benefits of Defining your Service Level Expectation

“In Kanban, how do you determine what size of work item you should pull in?”  This was recently asked in one of my Kanban classes.  Often, this type of question comes from someone familiar with the Scrum framework who is trying to understand how to break work items down in Kanban. As part of the …

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Revoluciona tu flujo de trabajo: el impacto de las políticas en un sistema Kanban

Un sistema Kanban tiene como objetivo optimizar el valor optimizando el flujo al encontrar el equilibrio adecuado entre eficacia, eficiencia y previsibilidad en la forma en que se realiza el trabajo. Las políticas juegan un papel fundamental en el éxito de un sistema Kanban. Los miembros del equipo pueden comprender sus roles y responsabilidades con …

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Revolutionizing Your Workflow: The Impact of Kanban Policies

A Kanban system aims to optimize value by optimizing flow by finding the right balance of effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability in how work gets done.  Policies play a critical role in the success of a Kanban system. Policies in a Kanban system define rules, guidelines, team member roles and responsibilities, and procedures for handling work …

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Who defines the workflow, you or your team?

We regularly talk about optimizing the workflow but we don’t talk as often about who should be doing that optimization. Should it be the manager, or some dedicated process specialist, or should we be leaving it up to the team to figure out their own workflow? Spoiler: We should let the team figure it out. …

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How to Limit Your WIP in Kanban

One of the most asked questions during Kanban training is: how to limit WIP? But before we talk about it, what is WIP anyway? WIP is the acronym for: work in progress. Which is a flow metric that shows how many items that have started but not finished. When we talk about limiting WIP, we …

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Three Ways Kanban Helps Us Solve Complex Problems

The way to solve complex problems is to break it down into smaller pieces, start with what we know or more often, a hypothesis around an assumption we are making, and then assess the outcome to decide what to do next. Agile frameworks and techniques like Scrum, XP, Feature Driven Development, Crystal, etc. are designed …

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Collective Flow – The Rhythm of Creative Collaboration

If I only had a dollar for every time an Agile team member complained about not having time free of distractions so that they could completely focus on getting their work done… In the article Flow: The Secret of Creativity, High Performance, and Happiness, we explored Flow from the perspective of the individual and discussed …

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The Three Things They Don’t Tell You About Kanban

Motivated people, a valuable service, an experienced coach, a trained workforce. Even with all these things in place, we ran into a few challenges when using Kanban in an HR environment. Here are the three things we continue to struggle with in our ongoing Kanban journey at a major international firm. Thing 1: Tools Matter …

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