Lean methods emerged from manufacturing, where conventional wisdom was that the goal is to produce as many goods as possible, as quickly as possible. When Taiichi Ohno introduced the Andon cord at Toyota, authorizing every employee on the assembly line to immediately halt production when they noticed a problem or defect, even people in his […]
Editor’s note: The article was updated in April 2018. Originally published in May 2016. Having an effective and efficient project or workflow management system in place is important for any company in the business for creating something new and useful. There are countless steps, multiple team members and a potentially endless set of features at […]
“Drucker said a long time ago: manage the work, not the workers.” – Andy Carmichael What if there was an easier way to get started with Kanban? Yes, there are principles, systems, values, practices… But all you really want to know is how to get started now. If that’s you, the Kanban Lens is for […]
In all too many organizations, “manager” is nothing more than a different job description and pay scale. Managers go to more and different meetings, and complete more and different paperwork, but aren’t fundamentally different from other employees. They don’t require more of a person as a mentor or as a leader, and they don’t require […]
Even highly successful, highly motivated people sometimes struggle with procrastination. They know what to do, but they just can’t bring themselves to get started. It’s a more common problem than you may think. According to psychologists, nearly 20% of all adults procrastinate some of the time. Procrastination is a destructive habit. It not only inhibits productivity, […]
One of the main properties of Kanban is limiting work in progress (WIP). This allows you to match any team’s development (or your personal) capacity. The most widely-adopted practice is to set WIP limits per column (workflow stage). However, it is also acceptable to establish limits per person or team. In my experience, WIP limits […]
High-quality project outcomes completed within a manageable time-frame – isn’t that what most businesses ultimately want to achieve? Of course that we all want projects to be completed on time and within initial budget. However, statistics are not so promising. We recently found some eye-opening data that caught our attention. According to PMI.org, for every […]
This is a sequel to the first guest post of Robert Falkowitz on the Kanbanize blog. Some of the information inside this article may be confusing if you haven’t read How Does Kanban Support Service Management Agility? To get the most value out of this post, please take the time to get familiar with Part 1. […]
Bob asked, “Is the project on schedule?” Will said, “We do Agile. We don’t follow a schedule.” Bob was left wondering how he might report this to the governance teams. Cathy asked, “What scope will be delivered in the next 2 months?”, to which Joe answered, “We are agile. We do not estimate all work […]
It might seem like a no-brainer that encouraging collaborative project management among stakeholders and team members on essentially any undertaking is crucial to success. However, you would be surprised to find that much of the waste in businesses, large and small, derives from miscommunication and missed opportunities. The reason is that many teams don’t really know what does collaborative working […]