UPDATE I have learned new stuff. There are a better ways. Find the update here This post is all about just aggregating and averaging out to a single number… and then I can’t control myself but start to lay that number out over the individual weeks too. That, and we will use the Gauge-chart for the first time in my life. This is the fifth post in my series on some simple kanban board statistics. We have been talking about: Lead time Lead time with filters Throughput Where time is spent Common questions Although I have the diagrams laid out and everything is visible one of the most common questions I get is: But what is the overall average? How long does an S usually take? After I explain that this is just a point-in-time-reading that will not mean much and then get forced to dig up the number somehow...

This is the fourth post in my series on some simple kanban board statistics. We have been talking about: Lead time Lead time with filters Throughput And this time it’s time to see if we can visualise a bit where time is spent. For this first post, we will make some basic classifications of active and not active or not “on the board” and “on the board”. In the coming posts I want to expand on this and see if we can make a distinction between other states on the board as well, but for that, we need to expand the data in “Raw data”, because that data only contains completed items right now. Ok - let’s get going. As for all these post I am in this Google Sheet - make a copy if you want to play along The dates There are three dates that are important for...

UPDATE I have learned new stuff. There are a better ways. Find the update here Lead time is awesome to track and try to improve. In fact, it’s something that will guide you to a lot of improvements and should be front-and-centre of your process metrics. But that says very little about how much that gets done per time unit. Doing one thing in a day, fast and with quality, and then nothing for the rest of the month means that no other things get done. Let’s start to track another metric; throughput or the amount of material or items passing through a system or process. With the data, we have this is pretty easy to get hold of. Setting up Like before, the goal is to not touch the “Raw data”-tab so that our exported data can be updated in that one place and the rest will be calculated...

UPDATE I have learned new stuff. There are a better ways. Find the update here This is the second post in my series where I show how you can get make powerful visualizations of process data. As before, my goal here is that you can dump your process data into one tab of my sheet and then the dashboard will make all the other calculations. In the first post, I talked at some length about other goals of this tool and some of the principles I built these ideas on. Speaking of those principles; in this post, I will violate one of them a bit, by adding a filter capability to the lead time chart, so that we can see just a part of the data. The reason I want to do this is that, as it the chart stands now, it’s a bit too noisy and has a lot...

UPDATE I have learned new stuff. There are a better ways. Find the update here I have been coaching agile teams for about 15 years now. One thing that I often help teams that I coach is to tap their process of some valuable data. It turns out that many of the tools that we are using have a lot of data in them that we seldom look at and even more seldom act on. Most of these tools (like JIRA or Team Foundation server) obviously have ways of looking that this data too, but I’ve found that it’s either really hard to understand the visualizations or that the reports that you can produce simply don’t cut along the right axis. I’ve now grown tired of recreating these simple reports for every client and wanted to share my, very simple, stats here. This way I can reuse it for future...

At </salt>, a boot camp that I’ve been part of setting up, I get to try all kind of different things that I haven’t done before. Mostly around configuring, management and supporting the students computers and our code. Just last week we had the need for a simple way to do a copy of our GitHub repositories. I did some research and found a simple way that I’ve put together in a script. I wanted to share it here. The case At Salt we have all our code, exercises and test checked in at GitHub. A normal workflow includes the students, cloning the repository to a branch with the name of their mob (programming) team. They then commit code to this repository. This becomes messy as we are running several courses per year and need to keep the different courses separated. We have, therefor, created a template repository and then...

When I introduce agile I do that through a nice little quandrat 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 with you, as I think...

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. A board is just a tool A board visualizes your work. That is its use. Just like a hammer is used to hit (and occasionally extract) nails. Use this tool to get more value from the tool. If you find the board “being a pain in the ass” or “hindering from working at all” then you should probably find another way to visualize your work. I strongly suggest that you visualize the work somehow, but find a way that doesn’t hinder you, especially not...

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. Game plan My game plan was pretty easy: Create a LICENSE with the proper text. Clone all repositories of the organisation to a new folder Loop over all the repositories and add the LICENSE file to each of them Add and commit to git and then push to the remote repository Create a static license file I went to Choose A License , picked an appropiate license and create a file out of that text. I ensured to update it with our company name....

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 together. Well.. thanks for...