In the Kanban Guide, we purposefully gave preference to the word “optimizing” over  the word “maximizing”.  This is because to “maximize” value is a very dangerous sentiment.  Its fairly straightforward to maximize value over the short term.  Just burn your people out, make decisions where you favour long term risk for short term gain (instead of short term risk …

The Kanban Pocket Guide: Chapter 5 – Improving a Workflow to Optimize for Flow Read More »

Pre-covid19 pandemic definition of Kanban: “We have Post-Its up on a whiteboard”. Post-covid19 pandemic definition of Kanban: “We have a Jira board set up”. I’d love to know where the misconception that Kanban is only about visualizing work came from.  Saying that Kanban is only about visualization is like saying Scotland is only about whisky or …

The Kanban Pocket Guide: Chapter 4 – Defining and Visualizing a Workflow Read More »

I once worked with a team that had designed a Kanban board which had a global Work In Progress limit of 9.  They had also added an expedite lane on their board (a big no-no as anyone who has followed my work knows) but at least had set a WIP Limit of 1 for that expedite …

The Kanban Pocket Guide: Chapter 3 – Actively Managing Items in a Workflow Read More »

Maybe you’ve heard a myth about Kanban that goes something like this: “Because Kanban has no timeboxes, items are allowed to take as much time as they need to finish.” Or maybe you’ve heard something like this: “We can’t do Scrum because we can’t finish items in two weeks.  So we do Kanban because Kanban has …

The Kanban Pocket Guide: Chapter 2 – The Service Level Expectation Read More »

“How would you teach someone to read a Cumulative Flow Diagram?”  (Spoiler alert: the CFD is most definitely NOT the single most important part of Kanban.) It was circa 2010 and I had just met Frank Vega for the first time at a Kanban meetup.  In all honesty, I may have met Frank in passing before that, …

The Kanban Pocket Guide: Chapter 1 – The Single Most Important Part of Kanban Read More »