August 21, 2016

Handling ticket Issues With Kanban

David J Anderson's book on Kanban shows us that a way to handle ticket issues is by attaching a color tag to a ticket to make it visible. An issue is a ticket-related event that becomes an impediment to its value flow, such as a defect, insufficient definition, unresolved dependency, etc. What I encounter often is, people have a natural tendency to move the ticket to where the dependency lies.
July 21, 2016

Due Dates in Kanban Systems

Many teams adopting Kanban come from Agile background. Agile thinking has discouraged the use of Due Dates. Due Dates breed undesirable behavior. Focus on Due Dates results in teams working under significant pressure. Quite often, that translates into short cuts in Design/ Testing activities. The net effect is that work quality is compromised and technical debt piles up.
January 31, 2016

Kanban – The Product Manager/ Owner’s BFF!

Of all the roles in a software or product development organization, I will argue the Product Manager’s (or Owner’s) job is the most challenging. On the one hand, the task of figuring out just what to build is complex and multifaceted. On the other hand, in any reasonably mature product organization, there is so much work that is going on and so much new demand, that the Product Manager can wish all they want in terms of product innovation and focus on the product roadmap, but failure and customer demand pretty much hijacks most of the Dev capacity in the organization.
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!”
December 23, 2014

SwiftKanban Year-end update

We've spent the last couple of months squashing bugs and improving SwiftKanban in every way possible. We're pleased to announce that we've added quite a few features too; here are the highlights -
December 2, 2014

The Flow State

This is a series of blogs of my thoughts on the most important of human endeavors, Work and its associated things like Productivity and Processes. This is third in the series. In this blog, we explore the possibility of creating conditions for optimal experience at our work and jobs, more commonly referred to as "Flow State".
September 18, 2014

10 Factors to Consider for your Kanban Board Design

How do you design your first Kanban board? This thought was triggered by a question posted by someone who works at an agency and were trying to figure out the best way to set up their Kanban board. The agency appears to be a small team working on multiple customer assignments and they wanted to use Kanban to track all of the work they do.
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!
July 15, 2014

Purpose – The Hidden Lever of Productivity?

(This is a series of blogs of my thoughts on the most important of human endeavors, Work and its associated things like Productivity and Processes. This is second in the series).