Tag Archives: Kanban
What are you passionate about?
At Rally, Tim asked me this in my interview. And as we went through a recent company retreat, Jeff asked me this a few times. Here’s my answer. Continue reading
Kanban is the Agile way of saying “Phase Gate”
So that we can easily find ways to constantly improve while collaborating effectively and sustainably, I like kanban as a tool which shows what constrains transforming concepts into cash. I believe it allows us to see the whole system and our part in what to do to help in the transformation of the system into a better one and our ideas in to innovation. It seems to me there would be greater benefits for all involved. For software a kanban tool must be highly visible, with a policy to strictly limit work in progress and a policy to only accept … Continue reading
Will they be twiddling their thumbs?
After a few months working with a client, a WIP limit was introduced on story points at the latest planning meeting. When we started I said, “The good news is, you no longer need to track hours remaining. The better news is that you may never have to have this type of meeting again.” Here’s a nearly verbatim email from senior management, after planning. We concluded the sprint planning today with a stack ranked backlog based on work folks did over the last couple of days (to get it prioritized). The sprint planning went well, all teams are “fully loaded” … Continue reading
KFC Slides and Simulation Now Online
Available from Karl’s blog for download. The session went well, everybody returned for the second half from the first half. I really enjoyed the simulation at the end, although we ran out of time to fully go through it. If you happen to use it, would you contact us and let us know how it went?
KFC Development – Finger Lickin’ Good
As Karl Scotland noted, we will be presenting a session on Kanban, Flow and Cadence (KFC) at the Agile Conference this year. This will be Thursday 7 August from 8-10 and then 10:30 to noon in the Essex Ballroom as part of the Breaking Acts Stage. This workshop explores three important Lean concepts – Kanban, Flow and Cadence (KFC) – which can be combined to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the more common timebox-based approaches of more traditional Agile methods. The presenters will describe their experiences implementing these ideas at Yahoo! and explain the … Continue reading
Simulations for Throughput and Pull
All you need is a pack of cards… Ask people what kind of typical things happen to get a user story from the backlog to in the hands of users. Agree on the most common 3-5 things, such as: exemplify/design/build, or story/TDD/accept/deploy, or the typical todo/wip/done or the traditional analysis/build/validate/deploy Group people by this same number at a table. The grouping of will make more sense in next exercise. As prep for the next exercise, also count out 4 aces, three twos, two threes, one four and one five. Set aside from the 20 used here. Maximize what is done … Continue reading
Limiting Work in Progress (WIP)
For me, it’s all about getting the backlogs together and putting strict limits on WIP. It is a mess to find a bottleneck, or get to done, when too many things are in flight. Remember: there is one expedite slot to override WIP, but only one. Two ways to limit WIP: With the value stream mapped, look at the resources within a certain step and ensure there are no more slots than people in that step. If there is an inability to get the value stream map, or while you’re going there, write a sticky for the name of each … Continue reading
Speaker Series
A lot of popular folks come to Yahoo! and hang out. There are experts, authors, musicians, luminaries, – giving talks, running workshops, attending conferences, performing, and being a presence on the campus. Our own group has had people in. I’m not sure who they all are. I hear there was Mary Poppendieck, who’s suggestion of eliminating waste may have been interpreted by a few as meaning some roles could be considered redundant. Seems a shame. Since I’ve been around, there has been two people we’ve brought in. The first was Jim Coplien, who shook things up a bit. People are … Continue reading
Anatomy of the Corbis Operations Review
Recently on the kanbandev Yahoo! group, there were some messages going back and forth between Corey and David on the differences between a retrospective and an operations review. I think it was decided that the decoupled Operations review is more of a presentation, where the retrospective is a focused discussion. Corey was relating the ops review as multi-team stand up in the large, and then it sounds as if the retrospective would be follow-up work for specific teams. At any rate, here’s David’s explanation: Anatomy of an Operations Review Operations Review Chapter 14 from Agile Management: Operations Review
Finding and Releasing a Product Development Bottleneck
With iterative software, we talk about doing all the necessary functions, such as Design, Develop, Inspect, and Release, within each cycle to increment the value of available software to the customer. Our team divides the things in progress in to these categories, and has a finite amount of slots available to each category. Friday after the daily stand-up found me, the Product Owner (PO) and the Lead Developer discussing a constraint to work. The Design category is done with its work, but the ready slot for Development is full. The team cannot pull any work in to this area. The … Continue reading