December 18, 2016

The Tangible Value of The “Intangibles”

One of the important aspects of The Kanban Method is Class of Service (CoS). CoS is a risk categorization mechanism for any work item. We identify 4 Classes of Service – Standard, Fixed Date, Expedite, and Intangibles – depending on customer expectation, value and loss of business value identified as cost of delay. For this blog, cards that are classified as Intangible CoS will be referred to as “Intangibles”.
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.
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!”
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?
February 21, 2014

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!