When I introduce agile I do that through a nice little quadrant originally from the This is Lean book by Pär Åhlström and Niclas Modig, and visualized by Håkan Forss. I’ve wrote about it here. This post will only focus on the top left triangle - where we focus on maximizing resource utilization.

But I’ve noticed that personal stories sticks better and I have used a story about my dentist to show an example of a setting that focuses heavily on the resource utilization.

I lately was called back to a checkup at the dentist and did some further research. It was a fascinating peek into a world where many people was working hard, smart and diligent to achieve an outcome that was not any good for me as an end customer (aka the wrong thing, in my book).

I wanted to share this story...

Quite often I get to introduce people to using a “work visualization board” (often referred to as a kanban board), these days. When I do I’m struck with the common misconceptions that follow many tools - especially tools that I have been nudged (or forced) to use..

I wanted to share a few of the things that find myself repeating to new users of kanban boards.

Hey Marcus, can you just add a License file to each of our repositories?

All of them?

Yeah, all 42…

This was a task given to me about 50 minutes ago. I’m done now.

Obviously I spent all that time writing a script to do this. And I wanted to share this with you guys and my future self.

Obviously I learned a lot as well.

I got another email from a former client that I wanted to answer here on the blog. In fact, in this instance, I also got the same question during a Lean Coffee discussion at a current client too.

Without stating the whole email the questions were a little bit like this:

With kanban - isn’t there a risk that you lock in and cement the different parts of the board?

Also, are we not risking to focus too much on the efficiency of the individual steps in the workflow?

Since the board clearly shows bottlenecks in some areas we risk putting in an effort to solve that and then just move the workload to another place in the workflow.

and then in the lean coffee

I don’t like those columns - it looks like a waterfall. I just want DOING to show that we are working...

The last couple of weeks I have talked a lot about prioritization at my current client. In many conversations, I’ve felt the need to go back the foundation of things that I build my coaching and consulting on. For example, I might question how we prioritized as we done, and then I notice that people become defensive - thinking that I am questioning them rather than the way. This has led me to reflect, formulate and then re-iterate three basic assumptions that are increasingly important to me:

1. Everyone did their best, and continue to do so
2. There’s always more work to do than we have the capacity to do
3. We don’t know what will work best

Let me describe a little bit more what I mean.

At my current client, we are trying to make a change to focus more on flow than on resource utilization. This is harder than it sounds because much of the current ways of working, structures, roles and rewards are built to support another mindset.

One of the things that lately have popped up for me are the words we are using to describe the roles we have in different parts of the organization. This heavily prevailing in the IT-industry and maybe agile actually has helped to cement a few of these (an excellent keynote by Michael Feathers put me onto that idea).

This also ties into a great quote from David L. Marquet and his excellent Turn the Ship around book

There’s no they on Santa Fee!

Let me try to explain.

Recently, I received an intriguing question from Enea Zuliani and Michele Degrassi, who, after delving into Kanban In Action, began utilizing Kanban in their work. They posed a question regarding selecting a kanban (card) to work on when all options possess identical characteristics. With their permission, I’m sharing the question and my response here.

Deciphering Kanbans

Firstly, kudos for embracing the essence of kanban as a visual card system. In the realm of lean workplaces, the term “kanban” embodies the concept of visualizing work. However, in the IT industry, its interpretation varies, often encompassing process improvement methodologies or the visual board itself. Nevertheless, the core principle remains:

The purpose of kanban is to limit the number of kanbans so that each kanban flows fast over the kanban.

Thankfully, that wasn’t the question at hand.

Crafting a Response

In essence, the query revolves around how to...

I’ve just attended Agile Greece Summit which was a wonderful event. Many awesome speaker, met a few of my heroes (Linda Rising, Michael Feathers, David Snowden and Mark Schwartz) and met new friends (Portia Tung, Alison Coward, Lisi Hocke, Gary Crawford and Gwen Diagram, just to mention a few) and finally had many interesting and challenging conversations throughout the conference.

All in all it was a very good event to attended, expertly organized by an awesome team and I consider myself lucky to have been here.

As with many conferences an underlying theme starts to emerge from the different talks. I suspect we take inspiration from other speakers and conversations, but I’ve observed this too many times to think it’s a coincidence.

I wanted a few reflections that I got during this conference. It can be summed up in a...

I’ve had the great opportunity to do some extra work in a very different environment this week; I’ve been a musician in a professional orchestra - the awesome Östgöta Blåsarsymfoniker.

It was quite a treat to work in this group and get to play my instrument on a high level. Also, as an amateur, getting paid to play my instrument is … mind boggling.

Being part of this group for a few days made me notice a few rituals and practices that I think we can learn from. I wanted to share a few thoughts on them here.

Recently, I undertook a fascinating task for a client. As the “Head of Curriculum” at the School of Applied Technology, my responsibilities include crafting the content for bootcamps. Our inaugural bootcamp, “Fullstack JavaScript Developer with React and Express,” required me to swiftly set up 33 developer computers to ensure students could start coding within hours.

Here’s a rundown of how I accomplished this feat and the insights gleaned along the way.