My job is to help clients to use and adapt the principles of lean and agile to achieve a better flow of value. Sometimes I get questions from friends and old clients about how to do specific things. And sometimes I get questions from complete strangers. Last Tuesday was such a day when Emily reached out via email and asked me three insightful questions. I was happy to do that and my “fee” was that I can publish the questions and my answers here on the blog. So you’re reading my payment When applying this process how did you educate your customers? If you with customers mean the people downstream from us, receiving the value of our work, I often recommend transparency and small steps. One of the best things with kanban is the first principle of “Start where you are”. That means that for starters with don’t change a...

Many daily stand up meetings follow the patterns originally from Scrum - that is we ask each individual what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today and if anything is blocking them. This is a nice sentiment but misalign our focus. Because making sure that people are busy is not important… at least not compared to making work flow. There’s an easy way to change our focus, at least in our morning meetings. Blocked is not a column Todo - Doing - Done is not your process Done? There’s no Done Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit Walk the board from right to left Focus on the work - not the workers And for the love of everything holy - please tear off the post-it’s the correct way! Introduction I’ve actually lost a gig...

When kanban first came into common use and practice it was often posed as an alternative to Scrum. Well, as Torbjörn Gyllebring told us many years ago, kanban is not your process. Kanban is a process improvement tool and works on whatever process you apply it to. It’s one of the powers of the tool and the reason I like kanban so much. However, for many early adopters of kanban, removing the cermonies of Scrum sometimes went overboard and we removed everything that constrained us and made us make tradeoffs. Kanban - love it! No planning, no sprints, no constraints - it’s just our board and work flows as fast as it flows… Nice! Well - it’s not really a kanban board if you don’t have a work in process limit. Let me explain a bit further. Blocked is not a column Todo - Doing - Done is not your...

One of the things that always catches my attention when I walk past a board is the colours of the stickies. Why? Because colours requests our attention and can help us in understanding more about a thing. Red is naturally a warning (in western culture at least), green feels ok, etc. This is why I get troubled when I hear that the reason that we have chosen the colours of the stickies on our board is “because we took the ones that was closest to us”. That is sad and I share a few thoughts on how to improve on that state of mind - it’s easy. Blocked is not a column Todo - Doing - Done is not your process Done? There’s no Done Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit Walk the board from right to...

This comment is closely related to the comment about columns. In this post I’m more specifically want to talk about the “Done”-column. The last column on most boards. I’m on a crusade to rename Done all over the world. Blocked is not a column Todo - Doing - Done is not your process Done? There’s no Done Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit Walk the board from right to left Focus on the work - not the workers And for the love of everything holy - please tear off the post-it’s the correct way! Let’s do it! Done-column - you’re going down! Done - what is that? I claim that there is not “Done”-column. This is something that grown on me over the last couple of years and I think under the influence of the idea of...

Ok, got a few encouraging comments on the first post so I’ll continue this series. If for nothing else it’s keeping to my orignal blog-idea to write things down to clear it up for me and not forget about it. Blocked is not a column Todo - Doing - Done is not your process Done? There’s no Done Colors speaks volumes - use them deliberately It’s not a kanban board if you don’t have a WIP limit Walk the board from right to left Focus on the work - not the workers And for the love of everything holy - please tear off the post-it’s the correct way! This time I wanted to talk about the column themselves, or maybe I dare to talk about the process they reflect. Our process for work! Todo - doing - done is not your process This is probably the best example of cargo...

It’s very interesting to see how a practice goes from a nice idea to best practice and over to tradition. In my community, the software industry, things move very fast so I’ve seen many examples of this; simple things like formatting of code, background colors of editor all the way to architectural patterns - all of these become default usages and tradition, and sometime “the way it’s done”. Sometimes people calls it cargo cult which refers to that I often do things without really reflecting over why. When it comes to my field of practice; lean and agile there’s bountyful examples of cargo culting, but in this series of post I wanted to examine a few very practical things that I often notices on how agile team uses their boards. It will be a little hit-list of my pet issues commonly found on agile/kanban-boards I’ve seen. Here’s the things I...

Scope creep is a common phenomenon in software development where the size and workload increases beyond what we first envisioned. In many cases this is so small that it happens without anyone really noticing but sometimes it can degenerate and slow down progress considerably. Sometimes even stopping a progress or team completely. Scope creep comes from many sources, sometimes from the outside, but I think that the most common one are ourselves: That value should probably be a configuration property… What if someone decides to change database server… This is of course good questions to ask and could be value, but I think there’s more value in getting a feature in front of users and learn about their behavior and how the feature is doing. After that we can harden it, make it more flexible or otherwise improve it. Drifting away from my main topic… So now you’ve experienced scope...

The other day I heard someone distinguish between a few roles that I take on from time to other. I’ve never made the different between those roles clear to myself and as a consequence I end up doing them all at the same time, in my consulting. This can sometimes be confusing for me, and my clients but makes me also ineffective in the role I’m trying - or is expected to play. I actually wrote about this in a post a few years ago - without really knowing what kind of problem I was addressing. In this post I wanted to share a few thoughts on these different roles and hopefully Without saying each of the following headings could easily fill books. I’m just jotting down my current understanding of the concepts here, that helps me to clarify it for myself. If you find it useful it would make...

Sometimes I get the opportunity to try things that I never done before, or didn’t think that I would dare. Do those things if you get the chance. Always do them! I never regretted taking one of those opportunities, after they are over. In this case I got the opportunity to talk with a bunch of school kids (14-16 year olds) about Lean, experimenting and how to iterate ever faster by improving your process. It was quite the experience and I wanted to share some highlights of the time I had together with them. Background I have a friend, Tristessa, that is a teacher in an international school in Stockholm. She’s a brilliant horn-player and we play in the same band. One day in our rehearsal she told me about a course about Product Design that she was running in her class (SO COOL) and her students had many of...