Does this title sound confusing? Don’t worry. By the end of this article you will see that it is simpler than you think. You will be able to measure the right cycle time with your eyes closed. For those of you who are not so familiar with the term, cycle time is one of the […]
A few days ago our marketing team had its weekly replenishment meeting and somehow we started a discussion around the following topic: Do we need both, WIP limits and service level of agreements (SLAs)? Well, the short answer is yes. But the answer can also be “it depends.” So, it depends on what? After a […]
Organizations have, long enough, supported the top-to-bottom hierarchy where decision-makers and employees are two different kinds. But as times change, so do organizations. Or, at least, the smart ones. Flat hierarchy, close-knit working environment, open workspaces, and virtual teams—this is what the modern business world is about. In recent years, many organizations have switched to […]
This interview took place after Marisa Keegan’s keynote at the Global Kanban Summit in Alexandria US, 2019. Marisa is a Certified Executive Coach with her Masters in Industrial Organizational Psychology. She helps CEOs design, implement and achieve their strategic plans. She has an extensive career working within Fortune 500 and high growth technology companies such […]
Tracking progress is the core of the continuous improvement process. Without regular monitoring and tracking one cannot either recognize whether any changes should be applied nor realize if everything is going on well. An old management cliché states that you “can’t manage what you don’t measure” and this is exactly the case here. Monitoring and […]
The term continuous improvement 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, logical, and sustainable improvement […]
In the past, companies have traditionally relied on authoritarian structures to delegate responsibility down the organizational hierarchy. However, leadership models (e.g. Shared Leadership) are becoming flatter in nature as the continuous business development requires organizations to adopt new ways of advancing ahead of their competitors. First, let’s see what is wrong with hierarchical leadership. The […]
Imagine the following situation: You are a project manager in a marketing agency and need to develop a media plan for a big client that generates a lot of money for your company. If you are doing traditional project management, you will most probably plan a series of activities and prepare a sequence with a […]
When talking about Lean, usually people tend to focus on the process management part. However, few realize that just adopting the most emblematic management tools such as Kanban may not necessarily bring the desired improvement without changing the way they lead. Now, we don’t plan to bore you with all the leadership fluff. Nor do […]
This article is going to explain a basic concept – how demand and throughput live together. It is going to touch a little bit from queuing and suggest ways to control both variables. As usual, we will be working with simple examples that make it easy to understand and apply the techniques that Kanbanize was built to enable. This time you will be an artist who owns an online business that doesn’t do so well, even though you send tons of paintings. Go through the entire post to figure out how you got out of this situation.