In my last post, I discussed practices and policies around emergency lanes. Today, during my visit to my client, I realized that we, ourselves, had created the need for them. The good news is, if we created the need, we can also eliminate it.

Let me explain.

The board at my client’s hospital doesn’t resemble your typical kanban board. However, we identified another need. Although it’s in Indonesian, I’ll guide you through it. Here’s how the board looked a couple of weeks ago:

• The board comprises 4 lanes:
  • The top 2 lanes are for larger projects lasting up to 6 months.
  • The lower 2 lanes, labeled “Perbaikan” or “Improvements,” are for smaller tasks targeted for completion within 2 weeks.
• Each project includes:
  • A brief project description.
  • “Untuk Besok” (Until Tomorrow) section listing tasks to be completed by the...

I’ve talked more about effectiveness vs efficiency than you all care about. The reason for this fascination might be that the word is mixed up in Swedish I guess; there’s only one word for these both concepts. Booh… Swedish.

Because the difference is paramount.

In the excellent book the Goal Dr Goldratt puts it like this:

Productivity is meaningless unless you know what your goal is

This is the same thing. I hear many people talking about efficiency, or that we should become both effective and efficient and yes, but all means, become efficient. BUT don’t speak another word about that until we all have a shared view on what the goal is. Without a clear goal - there can be no effectiveness. And then efficiency is pointless, as Dr Goldratt said.

My favorite explanation for the difference of effectiveness and efficiency makes this very clear;

Usian Bolt...

One of the things that first made kanban known and loved was the introduction of emergency lanes. Or at least the lack of fixed scope for a sprint where sudden urgent work items was hard to handle in other methods.

Many kanban boards have an emergency lane. However often I see it abused (or being feared to be abused) and hence it will not be as useful as it could be. It’s a really great tool, both for “product owners” and the team alike. In this post I wanted to share some policies that I’ve found useful to manage emergency-lanes (or equivalent).

This [thing I say often](https://www.marcusoft.net/tags/#Things I say often) “thing” is quite new and a bit personal. It’s very important for me personally and I hope that you like it.

I’ve had the great, but scary, opportunity to play a couple of times under the late James Watson. For any non-brass-players he’s one of the truly great trumpet players of the world, brought up as a wonder boy in the brass band movement. Later in his career he returned and made the world famous Black Dyke Band into a new being - possibly changing what people thought a brass band could be for ever.

Also - he’s know for being very … direct … even mean sometimes during rehearsals. But I fondly remember a lot of things from the hours I got to spend under his direction.

This is just a short one. I don’t know where I picked the thought up, probably from David Marquet or Simon Sinek.

But really I’m so tired about talking about management for organization and teams. Manage. That’s what I do with computer resources, stuff and sheep.

I have higher thoughts for just about every person I ever met. If something these people need a leader. Someone that points, with clarity, towards the better future we are trying to reach, creates an environment where I can feel safe and give room and be challenged to be the best I can be.

I much rather talk about leadership and leading than management and managing. Leadership is what you use on people, management is for your pens or hard disks.

One of the “clients” I work with right now is a hospital. We have tried to turn their performance around and they are improving immensely. In fact - I think they will be just fine. I did not think that just 4 months ago.

One of the things that we have talked with the management team about is trying to do smaller things often and act on the feedback we get from that. Nothing new … in software development or other lean practitioners, but in this setting. I hear eyelids popping open everyday.

How does that look? What have we done? Most of the work we have done has not directly with health care to do but rather change management and business in general. Very practical stuff mostly. In this post wanted to share two of our current projects (or Focus areas as we call them) where our approach made...

I’ve said this so often that we even wrote about it in Kanban In Action. It’s not a book about tearing off post-its, but it’s the printed kanban literature with the most geeky sidebar.

Post-its are such an integral part of agile that I’ve often joked the founding members probably own stocks in 3M.

I know embarrassing amounts of information about post-its; how they were accidentally invented, why the color is pale yellow, why the glue is where it is, how to open a pack with one hand, or a knee, etc.

But this simple little trick is something most people I tell it to have not reflected on.

I’ve already written about this before, but Hey - this was a [series](https://www.marcusoft.net/tags/#Things I say often) about things I said often.

Basically, but please read the other post instead, many times I’ve been at companies that want to improve but don’t want to change. This is impossible. Improving means changing. Changing doesn’t necessary means improving though.

To me this is one of the biggest misconceptions about agile; that it would be something that the IT-guys can start working with and we’ll all be better. It’s not. If you change something locally the impact will also just be local.

In the great book This is Lean the authors defines Lean as a business strategy. I like that and the same goes for agile:

• it’s a strategy - there are many ways to reach your goal, this is just one
• it’s about business. It’s not about the robots...

Really … this is probably the word I use most often. And I’m proud of it!

Why?

It’s not only because I’m ignorant and forget things a lot, but to me this is where knowledge is started to be created. I’m guessing I could write an entire book on just this single word, so this post will just be a few thoughts off the top of my head.

All changes start with questioning the current status, or at least by longing for a better context (“Why can’t we be like XXX?”).

Once you think about it, Why might be the most powerful word there is. Every overthrown dictatorship in the world has started with someone asking: Why? “Why can he alone decide in this country?”, “Why should we pay taxes to Prince John?” or “Why should women have to wear clothes that cover them and not be treated...

I have probably introduce around 80-100 teams to the use of some sort of board to visualize their work. One of the things that I often … ah, always say and also have to repeat is this:

Nobody has told us to create a board. We do this for us. This is great because that it means that we can change it how WE see fit