When talking about marketing, we are often so focused on looking for ways of reaching our target audiences that we rarely consider how to do so efficiently. During my career, I’ve witnessed time after time marketers starting far more work than they are able to finish, priding themselves on how busy they are all the […]
As a CEO, a major part of my work is to define the strategy of the company and follow through on execution. Sounds easy, but it’s the most challenging job I’ve ever had. It takes enormous amounts of energy, military discipline, and courage. If you think I’m fooling you, just let that sink in: 90% […]
There is no doubt that Kanban is among the most famous methods for software development these days. However, people often forget that the method was initially tested and applied successfully in IT departments. Back in 2004, an IT team in Microsoft managed by Dragos Dumitriu was struggling to improve his team’s efficiency and to optimize […]
“When you visualize, then you materialize.” This quote of the American psychologist Denis Waitley perfectly summarizes one of the most effective tools used by modern leaders for managing their time, team process or even entire companies. Although there are different means to use for visualizing work, there’s hardly any tool capable of outperforming a task […]
Formal roles are important to people, we get that. We even had a recent company-wide discussion on the topic. As Lean blossoms best in an environment involving as little constraints as possible for flow to develop and evolve, we want to address the topic on roles in Kanban. Recently, I overheard an old question related […]
It is normal for most teams that are just starting out with Kanban to put the traditional, physical implementation of the method into practice. However, when you start to get the hang of it and reach a point where rapid process improvement becomes more difficult, you’ll need the added functionalities that Kanban software solutions provide […]
In the century of teamwork and shared responsibility, we have found ourselves in a world of inefficiency and management dependency. For a while now, business culture has been shaped by a perfectly vertical hierarchical structure. In the recent years, it has started crashing down as over 80% of business teams globally report inefficiency and failure […]
Should we avoid creating tasks that simply can’t have a meaningful definition of “done”? I stumbled upon this dilemma a while ago. It is a logical question, mostly related to agile software development, but it is more than relevant for all sorts of teams. Especially those practicing Lean and Kanban in particular. In the following […]
Lean was developed for delivering products and services with unquestionable value at the right moment to the end customer. To help you with that, the methodology focuses on identifying value-adding steps in your process and minimizing waste activities. Although it sounds pretty simple, there is a question that has been bothering managers and regular team […]
Now that according to Marc Andreessen “Software is eating the world,” more and more companies look for Agile as the rescue to address the challenge of digitalization. This makes complete sense, because if every company becomes a software company (also if it doesn’t know it yet) and if Agile is the approach for software development, why not taking Agile to the company […]