2019 has been good for us. We've made many new friends, supported conferences in countries we'd never visited before, on-boarded many new clients who seem to be very excited at having found our tools and along the way launched a couple of AI-based solutions that promise to help our customers work in ways they never thought possible before. We hope 2019 has been happy for you as well and wish 2020 to be much better!

Many organizations today are spending a lot of time and resources to try and create conditions for an optimal experience at work. While some teams have made the transition to ensuring 'Flow' in everything they take up and do, the vast majority are still stuck in the daily drudgery of whatever work is. This month's newsletter takes a peek at innovation, agility and flow in the workplace and how each can be nurtured by every organization.

With the digital disruption of business models and whole industries, business executives and process owners are faced with a variety of transformation challenges. The need to ensure alignment between strategic, tactical and operational work with greater transparency and collaboration is paramount.

Ideas for fulfilling customer needs can be generated much faster than they can actually be realized. This is the source of much tension between the organization and its customers, but also within the organization itself.

Ideally, Agile teams perform their work with zero interruptions. There would be no requests for 'Urgent! It's a matter of life or death' functionality. But, in our world, interruptions are as common and frequent as that urge for coffee! We have nothing against a good cup of joe, but we think everyone can better manage these interruptions without bursting a vessel.

Artificial Intelligence is impacting all industries. Everyone seems to be talking about Machine Learning nowadays (check 'ML' on Google Trends). And our realm of Project Management and Software Development finds itself right in the middle of all these exciting changes and new possibilities.

This month's newsletter features Story Points, Estimates and Due Dates. And a decent primer on the ever controversial, at least in the Agile Software development world, #noestimates movement :)

A recent study reported that 37% of the developers they surveyed used Scrum, 21% had an Agile-waterfall hybrid and 20% used Kanban. Another interesting finding was that the adoption of Scrum, Kanban and other Agile methods increased with the amount of overall experience the developer had in software development. (1)

This month's newsletter covers the topic of Kanban, providing insightful articles on applying Kanban to a traditional SDLC process, using Upstream Kanban for backlog grooming, aligning strategy to execution, and examining Estimation of software projects as a necessary evil!