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. […]
Bob asked, “Is the project on schedule?” Will said, “We do Agile. We don’t follow a schedule.” Bob was left wondering how he might report this to the governance teams. Cathy asked, “What scope will be delivered in the next 2 months?”, to which Joe answered, “We are agile. We do not estimate all work […]
It might seem like a no-brainer that encouraging collaborative project management among stakeholders and team members on essentially any undertaking is crucial to success. However, you would be surprised to find that much of the waste in businesses, large and small, derives from miscommunication and missed opportunities. The reason is that many teams don’t really know what does collaborative working […]
Elsewhere, I have proposed a Manifesto for Service Management Agility, describing what agility in managing services would be. Kanban is well known as a method for agile management. So let me put these two concepts together. How does Kanban support service management agility? How can agile service managers make good use of Kanban? A Manifesto for […]
So, what is it that makes a Kanban implementation successful? There is not a definitive answer to that question, but I will attempt to “prescribe” my own rules that have helped us so far.
Kanban has evolved from an exotic practice associated with manufacturing to a trendy method applied in practically every industry that you can think of from construction to healthcare. Its simplicity is attracting thousands of teams each year and after a short test run, many companies decide to implement it on a greater scale. However, it […]
Today’s business pace and dynamic workflows that push teams to their limits require a new way of managing work. Therefore, it is no surprise that methods such as Kanban that rely heavily on workflow visualization are gaining serious popularity in a growing number of industries such as software development, IT operations, product development, etc. In […]