Author Archives: Dimitar Karaivanov

About Dimitar Karaivanov

CEO and co-founder @KanbanizeInc., Speaker, Author, Lean Thinker, Portfolio Kanban enthusiast, passionate about efficiency at scale and hard rock.

cross departmental collaboration

A Step-by-Step Guide To Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Cross-departmental collaboration is one of the biggest challenges for project managers implementing Lean and Agile practices. No doubt about it.  The literature on the topic, however, often prescribes intangible and impractical ways to deal with this challenge. You will read about “eliminating dependencies”, “forming cross-functional teams”, “getting rid of silos” and so on. While these […]

agile capacity planning

How to Master Agile Capacity Planning with Kanban(ize)?

“How do you do capacity planning with Kanban?” – this has been a recurring question for us at Kanbanize. That is why we decided to address this topic formally through this article. When we get asked this question, it is usually one of these objectives/questions that people have: As a manager, I need to know […]

project management dependencies

How to Handle Dependencies in Project Management?

Before we jump into the profound topic of managing project dependencies, let’s set the ground for what this article covers and what it doesn’t.  First, this article will not educate you on what dependencies in a project are and why they harm your organization. If you’re reading this, you’re most likely aware of the topic […]

what's common between kanban and chess

What’s Common Between Kanban & Chess?

My father taught me to play chess when I was very little, maybe four. There are many prodigy children who beat chess masters at four, but I wasn’t one of them. I was average.

My father never let me win against him, just because I was his son. He has always been

kanbanizing the waterfall

Kanbanizing the Waterfall

The traditional waterfall approach to building software (and other things) has been anathematized as being the worst thing that can happen to a company and has practically been banned from the industry for good. Its successor – agile has been discovered and promoted as the only way to do things properly. Is this applicable to everyone?

Crossing the Kanbasm

Crossing the Kanbasm

Once in a while, people embarrass themselves publicly. As much as I hate these events, I’m no exception. One such mini-embarrassment for me was when I asked the following question on Twitter: Although I had the best of intentions, looking at the replies made it clear that I had something to learn. My attitude was […]