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

Many daily stand-up meetings adhere to Scrum’s traditional format, where each team member reports on their activities from the previous day, plans for the current day, and any impediments they face.

While well-intentioned, this approach misdirects our attention.

Ensuring team members stay busy isn’t as crucial as ensuring work flows smoothly.

A simple adjustment can realign our focus, particularly during 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!

When Kanban emerged as a popular practice, it was often presented as an alternative to Scrum. However, as Torbjörn Gyllebring emphasized years ago, Kanban is not a replacement for your process. Instead, it serves as a tool for process enhancement, adaptable to various workflows. This adaptability is one of its greatest strengths, and it’s why I’m such a proponent of Kanban.

However, some early Kanban adopters, in their eagerness to depart from Scrum’s ceremonies, went too far and removed all constraints and trade-offs. “Kanban—love it! No planning, no sprints, no constraints—it’s just our board, and work flows as fast as it flows… Nice!” But, to be honest, a board without a Work In Process (WIP) limit isn’t really a Kanban board. Let me explain why.

• Blocked is not a column
• Todo - Doing - Done is not your process
• Done? There’s no Done
• Read More

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
...

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!

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!

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.

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...

The other day I heard someone distinguish between a few roles that I take on from time to time. I’ve never made the differentiations 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, and it 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 want to share a few thoughts on these different roles and hopefully shed some light on their distinctions.

Without saying each of the following headings could easily fill books. I’m just jotting down my current understanding of the concepts here, which helps me clarify them for myself. If...

Sometimes I get the opportunity to try things that I’ve never done before or didn’t think I would dare. Always take those chances if you get them! I’ve never regretted seizing those opportunities once they’re over.

In this case, I had the chance to talk with a group of school kids (ages 14-16) about Lean, experimentation, and how to iterate faster by improving processes. It was quite an experience, and I want to share some highlights from the time I spent with them.

Background

I have a friend, Tristessa, who is a teacher at an international school in Stockholm. She’s a brilliant horn player, and we play in the same band. One day during rehearsal, she told me about a Product Design course she was teaching in her class (SO COOL), and her students were facing many of the challenges I encounter at work every day—needs for experiments, a...