“When you visualize, then you materialize.” This quote of the American psychologist Denis Waitley perfectly summarizes one of the most effective tools used by modern leaders for managing their time, team process or even entire companies. Although there are different means to use for visualizing work, there’s hardly any tool capable of outperforming a task […]
Formal roles are important to people, we get that. We even had a recent company-wide discussion on the topic. As Lean blossoms best in an environment involving as little constraints as possible for flow to develop and evolve, we want to address the topic on roles in Kanban. Recently, I overheard an old question related […]
It is normal for most teams that are just starting out with Kanban to put the traditional, physical implementation of the method into practice. However, when you start to get the hang of it and reach a point where rapid process improvement becomes more difficult, you’ll need the added functionalities that Kanban software solutions provide […]
In the century of teamwork and shared responsibility, we have found ourselves in a world of inefficiency and management dependency. For a while now, business culture has been shaped by a perfectly vertical hierarchical structure. In the recent years, it has started crashing down as over 80% of business teams globally report inefficiency and failure […]
Should we avoid creating tasks that simply can’t have a meaningful definition of “done”? I stumbled upon this dilemma a while ago. It is a logical question, mostly related to agile software development, but it is more than relevant for all sorts of teams. Especially those practicing Lean and Kanban in particular. In the following […]
Lean was developed for delivering products and services with unquestionable value at the right moment to the end customer. To help you with that, the methodology focuses on identifying value-adding steps in your process and minimizing waste activities. Although it sounds pretty simple, there is a question that has been bothering managers and regular team […]
Now that according to Marc Andreessen “Software is eating the world,” more and more companies look for Agile as the rescue to address the challenge of digitalization. This makes complete sense, because if every company becomes a software company (also if it doesn’t know it yet) and if Agile is the approach for software development, why not taking Agile to the company […]
Have you ever experienced burnout at work? The Chances are that you probably have without even knowing it. Occupational burnout has become such a regular occurrence in the lives of knowledge-work professionals, particularly considering today’s ever-increasing demands. Many of us aren’t even aware of how close we might be to burning out, or – worse […]
Part 1 of this article provided some practical tips about the very basis of practicing Lean management – applying the 5 principles of Lean in practice. In part 2, you’ll learn the characteristics of an effective lean team, and how to achieve them. Characteristics of an Effective Lean Team All managers know that there are […]
One of the key benefits of Lean is that teams are largely autonomous and self-organizing. The assumption is that every team member knows what is expected of them and when, and are able to work independently on tasks and deliver quality work with little oversight. However, this basic assumption of autonomy and self-sufficiency does not […]