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.
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 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).
June 5, 2014

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

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!