When managing knowledge work projects, the word “dependency” is often associated with delay. Honestly, that comes as no surprise because the traditional way of managing dependencies (using Gantt Charts) is not reliable in an environment where requirements frequently change. Following the same old approach requires project managers to rework their initial plans often. In turn, […]
Most project management tools and methods, focus mainly on 3 dimensions: Time, Budget and Scope. Kanban has embedded in its core a fourth dimension: Efficiency.
Back in the days, project managers saw resource planning as a critical element for project success. Even now, many still insist on directly allocating tasks to team members. However, welcoming Agile and Kanban into the project management world shifted the focus towards managing the work instead of directly managing people. In other words, resource management […]
In Part I, we described our journey in Leading an Agile transformation for a complex hardware product development program in a highly regulated industry within a large multinational company. We didn’t consciously set out to implement ‘Agile’ or lead a scaled Agile transformation. We didn’t have a masterplan describing how we were going to deploy […]
Leading a large-scale Agile transformation is hard. It requires relentless focus and discipline to create an environment that empowers teams to deliver innovation at pace. There are thousands of publications describing how this should be done in theory, yet not so many on how to translate that theory into practice. The majority of those that […]
There is an ongoing dispute in the Agile community focused on the question “Is Kanban Agile?”. Isn’t that funny? People argue and spend their time trying to classify the terminology to clarify what is inside the Agile universe and what is not. Where is the value in that? Instead of approaching this question like a […]
This month our team was part of the PMI Organizational Agility virtual series, so we used the opportunity to do a small survey. One of the main questions we wanted to explore was, “What is your biggest daily challenge when managing projects?”. Although for us, it seems that such struggles should already be in the […]
Kanban has long ago left the automotive industry and conquered the IT world, but now, with an increased focus on flow, it is about to expand its reach to the entire business. Many business leaders have realized that Kanban has an extremely flexible architecture that allows it to scale across the enterprise naturally and gently. […]
Virtually all companies use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) but too many are measuring the wrong things. The result is wasted effort and misdirection because choosing the wrong metrics rewards the wrong behaviors. U.S. banking giant Wells Fargo learned this the hard way. They incentivized associates based on a key metric: the number of accounts opened. […]
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 […]