April 10, 2015

Tales of Lean/ Agile and Paired Sweeping in Bengaluru!

I was in Bangalore for a few days, in part to attend the Agile India 2015 conference.  The Sunday morning after the conference got done, I decided to go for a walk.  Instead of the picturesque Cubbon Park close by, I decided to go exploring the city.  In keeping with the Lean/ Kanban principles discussed at the conference, I decided to maximize flow – and turn in whichever direction the pedestrian crossings were open.  That immediately put me on Kasturba Road.  I thought fleetingly, “Of course, Kasturba Gandhi (Road) had to be next to her husband Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road!”
September 7, 2014

Does your Kanban Board Reflect the Process you Actually Have?

I’m sure most of us have seen the famous cartoon strip about requirements management – which highlights what the customer asked for vs. what they really wanted!
April 16, 2014

Checklists – The Lowly and Well-kept secret of Successful Innovation?

Ideas are cheap. Execution is Everything.  One of the many tenets that one hears often in the Silicon Valley underscoring the fact that successful innovation requires not just the initial spark of an idea but the discipline to execute on it till it truly reaches its full potential and impacts people in the way the innovator perhaps originally thought it might! In fact, the history of innovation is replete with examples of not the one who had the original idea but the one who saw its potential and took it all the way to a huge market success!
February 11, 2014

How do you use Kanban in a Fixed Duration/ Fixed Cost Project?

This is a common dilemma for teams wanting to use Kanban for 'fixed price, fixed cost" projects.  On the one hand, you have a business demand to commit up-front to a timeline and scope (and cost) to deliver a product; on the other hand, you have a promising tool – Kanban – that completely does away with any concept of time (or scope) bucketing but yet promises higher value and better quality to the customer.
February 6, 2014

Who needs a Calendar in a Kanban system?!

Sometime back, we published a blog post Due Dates in Kanban Systems – which drew some flak from some folks who objected to the line of reasoning in that post. However, one of the commenters made a good point – that it made sense to have Due Dates in a Kanban system if in fact the process being visualized on the Kanban board already needed Due Dates.
January 20, 2014

Capacity Planning for Dynamic Teams

Projects are often executed by dynamic teams. They start with a small core team and as the project gains momentum, add resources over time. This is commonly seen in IT service organizations that do fixed price projects. Fixed price projects have a defined scope that needs to be delivered within a contracted budget and within a negotiated timeline. For the purpose of this experience report, “Dynamic teams” or “Fixed Price projects” will be used interchangeably.
December 31, 2013

Energetic. Responsive. Trying Harder. 2014, Here We Come!

Energetic, responsive, trying harder - those were some of the best compliments we received from our customers.  As one of them, who switched from a competing product to us, said, "It looks like you guys are always trying harder and better than the rest of them." Absolutely!
September 10, 2012

Why We Hate Process

Process improvement (PI) specialists have historically dealt with the challenge of implementing PI initiatives in any organization – especially the resistance to change from the people impacted by the change. Last week, we had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of great folks at Adobe, where among other people, we met Devin Rickard who is responsible for that exact same task at Adobe.
February 8, 2012

Effort Tracking with Kanban

Software development using Kanban principles has not focused on Effort Tracking (though there hasn’t been a strong position against the same). At Digité, we were practitioners of Iterative Software Development. As part of this process, we emphasized on Daily Effort Tracking (time filing) for several reasons: