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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]