Category: Kanban
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How to study the flow of work with kanban cards
Physical kanban walls, with index cards, present powerful and easy ways to collect data and encourage the team experiment with improvements to our process. I’ve come across a simple technique of writing a ‘column tally chart’ on the bottom of each index card as it crosses a kanban board to help study and manage the…
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How Kanban visualisations and conversations enable process improvement
After deciding to adopt a new process a key challenge is to actually start doing it. This is the story of how a team I’m working with decided to carry out code reviews as part of our process, and how our kanban board helped us. The kanban board helped us visualise this new step in our…
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Conversations for double-loop mindset changes with Kanban
You can watch the video of my talkfrom the Lean Software Systems Consortium (LSSC12) conference in Boston earlier this month. Visualising work is a key part of the Kanban Method. In many situations it can lead to people realising there are problems or opportunities for improvement, which can be successfully accomplished by simply changing behaviour…
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Effective decision making: avoid confusing discussions with decisions
A key to effective decision-making is to avoid confusing discussions with decisions. Discussions are important for ensuring that the widest range of information is available to make a decision, but treating a discussion as a decision is likely to lead to confusion, frustration and ineffective actions. Open discussions are important, but they’re not the same…
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Removing the bubbles: solving bottlenecks in software product development
A challenge with software product development is visualising the work so that you can spot where there are delays in the process of converting ideas from “concept to cash”. This post shows how a cumulative flow diagram helped identify a pattern of queues over time. Removing these queues had many benefits such as fewer errors,…
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Improvements on using a simple kanban for effective meetings
Since I posted last week about using a simple kanban to structure workshops, I’ve used the technique with several other clients and have made some subtle but useful improvements. Here are the key improvements: Making time constraints explicit. Ask everyone at the start of the meeting “are there any time constraints you have?”. Write a…
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Using a simple kanban to run effective meetings and workshops
I’ve found using a kanban a productive approach to structuring and running meetings, workshop and presentations. Many meetings or workshops are often run from a fixed schedule that isn’t easy to update or change and also isn’t visible to the participants. I wanted to find a better way of structuring the day which balanced some…
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How three forks on a hand-drawn chart helped a team improve
After visualising the workflow of a recent client’s software development process, and showing where the work was, the team realised there was a queue of tasks that had been developed and were waiting to be validated (‘tested’). The team decided to move from a “I just do my task” approach to a “whole team” approach…