What is continuous improvement? The term itself is fairly self-explanatory. It almost seems too simple, but this industry buzzword is about continually improving your business, processes, and way of working. How you go about studying, planning, implementing and evolving that improvement is where it gets more complicated. You need to encourage a philosophy of constant, […]
Project managers have a lot of people to keep happy. There’s senior management and there’s the client. Then, there are those folks too often overlooked in the project success equation: the team of contributors who are on the ground doing the work. Trying to juggle all these interests, agendas, and priorities can result in a […]
Lean is focused on delivering value to the customer, but never at the expense of the employee. Lean systems believe that empowered employees, treated with respect, are essential for delivering value. This means that the Lean principles not only can be employed by whole companies or whole teams, but can even be adopted at the […]
With Kanban 101 we are aiming to give our readers a jump-start guide to get their Kanban engine running. For this purpose we are going to use Kanbanize, so you can start implementing what you learn right away. The board is the first gradient of Kanban. Without it there are going to be just random […]
Organizations generally adopt Lean to move the needle on specific indicators. They want to be more productive, improve the health of the organization, or increase revenue. But the Lean concept isn’t simply about improving metrics; it is about changing the culture. And changing the culture begins with leadership. Everyone from the top down needs to […]
“Starting work doesn’t generate value, starting work only costs money. Finishing work generates value.” – Klaus Leopold First, there was personal productivity. Then, everyone started talking about Agile teams. Today, it’s time to take it even higher. In this episode of the Lamp, we are talking about business alignment with Klaus Leopold. Klaus is an experienced computer scientist […]
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 […]