February 20, 2017

Cycle Time goes Visual

Cycle time (or System Lead Time as some call it) is one of the most common metrics used to measure the effectiveness of a Kanban system. Cycle time is the time taken by a Kanban card to move from start to end on the board (or some part thereof). As you start using a Kanban system and implementing its principles, ideally the cycle time of the system should reduce. In David Anderson’s initial blogs “http://www.djaa.com/why-kanban-why-focus-lead-time-reduction” he has clearly emphasized the importance of reducing the lead or cycle time of a Kanban system. Besides the obvious advantage of “faster-time-to-market” or faster delivery of value to customer, lead time reduction usually mean reduction of wait times in the overall workflow as the Kanban system helps to highlight and reduce different types of waste, including time between handoffs, blocked time due to waiting on external (or internal) dependencies, etc.
October 27, 2016

Implementing Kanban in IT Operations – Digité

Most projects and business activity have a ‘flow’ or a ‘process’, comprising adjacent steps or phases, to produce a product or to deliver a service, to internal customers or external customers. Kanban is the way many teams and organizations visualize their work, identify and eliminate bottlenecks and achieve dramatic operational improvements. Kanban is an evolutionary approach to change and improvement irrespective of the method or framework currently in use.
October 17, 2016

Kanban and the Importance of Work In Progress (WIP) Limits

Attending Kanban Training 
September 27, 2016

SwiftKanban Feature Update – Sept 2016

With the latest update to SwiftKanban, we have made some exciting progress in supporting Enterprise Services Planning, Upstream or Discovery Kanban – and Portfolio Management with Kanban. At the same time, we have tackled one of the most needed, and fairly tricky, feature of customizing the information one can see on Kanban cards in the Kanban Board view.
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.
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!