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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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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Ideas para pensar sobre la implementación de Kanban

4 ideas claves a tener presente al implementar Kanban El cambio que buscamos implementar a través de Kanban como estrategia no se puede vender de manera creíble como algo que solo es beneficioso. Todo cambio trae incertidumbre y con suerte riesgos. Para acompañar a equipos y organizaciones, debemos mostrarles cómo los beneficios del cambio superan …

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Kanban + Lean UX = The Future of Agility

Box 1 frames the business problem to be solved; one could use the business problem template, the elevator pitch template, or free format. Box 2 is specific about the percentage or numeric improvement achieved if the problem was solved; the pirate metrics AARRR (#acquisitions, #activations, $revenue, %retention, #referrals) metrics are often used. Box 2 metrics …

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Kanban Adoption in Nigeria; A Frontier Worth Exploring

Nigeria, like other nations, is an evolving work environment. A nation of over 200 million people (UNDP, 2021). Interesting in her demographic is her workforce. From United Nations Population Fund statistics, over 50% of her population in the workforce is young and vibrant. The question then is, how can the Agile framework; Kanban, facilitate the delivery of value for Nigerian organizations and businesses? To answer this …

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How Kanban Can Help Combat Burnout

 “This Kanban thing is interesting, but it won’t work well for our team. We aren’t software engineers.” –me  As I sat in a hotel room one night six years ago in the waning days of a weeklong team offsite, I was trying frantically to find a reasonably priced option to fly home a day early. …

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