July 15, 2014
Purpose Priority Productivity

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).
June 5, 2014
The Enigma Of Employee Productivity

The Enigma of Employee Productivity

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said that his “quest” is to create a company “where people find deep meaning at work”. This struck me as very different. CEOs normally don’t talk of “quest” and “deep meaning”, they usually talk of stuff like increasing market share, profits, innovation, etc. Many questions kept popping in my mind; like- –Is he really serious about “deep meaning at work” thing? We understand it benefits the individual, but does it benefit the company? Do employees who find deep meaning at work create a better company?
April 16, 2014
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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 21, 2014
Blog Post

Kanban in Procurement – Customer Case Study

We are very honored to publish another case-study on the successful use of SwiftKanban for improvement of Procurement Process for the Brazilian organization Poiesis. The presentation shared in this post was prepared and presented by Clarinha Prado, a consultant with Gigante Consultoria, Brazil.  Clarinha has over 20 years of Business Analysis and IT consulting experience in a variety of fields, especially the financial sector. Thank you, Clarinha, for this excellent presentation!
February 21, 2014
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The Other (and very real) Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management!

What are the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)? Why should you care about ALM?
February 11, 2014
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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 10, 2014
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SwiftKanban 3.5.2

Hello again! We've improved our card search capabilities with this update and you now have the ability to track throughput for every Smart Lane!
February 6, 2014
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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
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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.