One of the joys of working as a coach for EMC Consulting are the regular opportunities to have deep conversations on various topics with my colleagues when we are in the office together. For example, earlier this week myself and Simon Bennett began to discuss way of talking to our clients about process such [...]
November 24, 2009 - 10:01 pm
Tags: Continuous Improvement, Kanban, Practices
Posted in Lean | 2 comments
When talking about Kanban Systems for Software Development, I always try to emphasis that the Kanban System is more than the tool, and is a System that should be owned by the team, rather than being imposed upon it. By owning it, and being part of creating it, a team are more likely to evolve [...]
November 5, 2009 - 4:45 pm
Tags: Kanban, Outcomes, Scrum, Sync Steps
Posted in Agile, Lean | 4 comments
I met up with Jean Tabaka last week for a coffee and we chatted over various things, including Lean, Kanban, “The Don”, Tufte, and Systems Thinking. One of the other areas was around the origins and original intents of Scrum. Jean mentioned an early paper(*) by Jeff Sutherland, written before the current terminology became standard, [...]
October 20, 2009 - 5:55 pm
Tags: FAQ, Kanban, Labeling, Scrum, Understanding
Posted in Agile, Lean | 17 comments
Firstly, this post is not an attempt to be divisive or competitive. Instead it is meant to be exploratory. What would it mean for the statement in the title to be true? Actually, the full statement was “People have so misunderstood Scrum, that they’ve reinvented it and called it Kanban”. It was made by Jim [...]
October 12, 2009 - 8:41 pm
Tags: Kanban, Software East
Posted in Announcement | No comments
I’ll be talking about 5 Steps to Kanban at Software East on November 19th. From the website:
This event will take place at Red Gate Software, Newnham House, Cambridge Business Park. See the location map for Red Gate Software.
BOOK NOW for this event. Tickets (including light buffet) £15 if booked on or before 16th November, £25 [...]
October 9, 2009 - 1:06 pm
Tags: CFD, Cumulative, Diagram, Flow, Schedule, Workflow
Posted in Lean | 1 comment
Mary Poppendieck gave a talk on Workflow is Orthogonal to Schedule at Agile2009, during which she very neatly transitioned a schedule-focused view of work, into a flow-focussed view. At least I thought it was neat, so I’m going to try and reproduce the basic elements here, using my favourite agile workflow.
4 Week Time-box Schedule
Here we [...]
October 6, 2009 - 11:48 am
Tags: Conference, Kanban, KSE:London
Posted in Lean | 1 comment
I ended up making notes at the Lean & Kanban UK Conference with good old fashioned pen an paper. Rather than try and write up those notes into something coherent and meaningful, I have decided to write them up in the style of a twitter stream. These are the things I would have tweeted if [...]
September 25, 2009 - 8:43 am
Tags: Kanban, Practices, XP
Posted in Lean | 13 comments
During recent discussions with XP folks on the topic of Kanban, it occurred to me that based on my understanding, XP can be described in terms of a Kanban System for Software Development. This is an attempt to do that, on the basis that it might be useful in helping teams understand Kanban concepts. I [...]
I’m going to be at Agile 2009 next week in Chicago. I’m not presenting any sessions this year, but I’ll be hanging around the Kanban stand at the Freshers Fair, and probably spending some time in Open Jam to hopefully catch up with people in person while I have a chance.
I’m also really pleased to [...]
August 14, 2009 - 2:21 pm
Tags: FAQ, Iteration, Kanban
Posted in Lean | 2 comments
There has been some recent discussion on the blogoshpere and twitterverse about the relationship between Kanban Systems for Software Development and the concept of iteration. The often raised concern that a Kanban System is “Waterfall 2.0” came up again, along with the suggestion that a Lean perspective might view iteration as rework, and as a [...]
June 30, 2009 - 11:15 pm
Sharing tokens across states can reduce tokens due to the ’sum of squares’ phenomenon, which is sort of like collapsing states, except you get to keep the visual control, the standards, and the statistics.
July 1, 2009 - 7:50 am
Go on Karl, after recent discussions how about:
0. Respect those doing the work
It can’t hurt and may just help readers remember where all this comes from.
I truly believe that this is a deeply held belief in the existing Kanban community, we need to work to ensure that as popularity increases we don’t loose this in favour of tools, limits and index cards.
Cheers
Dave.
July 1, 2009 - 4:11 pm
Corollas were fairly popular and selling well. We started with a plan to make 5000 cars. I instructed the head of the engine section to make 5000 units and use under 100 workers. After two or three months, he reported, “We can make 5000 units with 80 workers.”
After that, the Corolla kept selling well. So I asked him, “How many workers can make 10000 units?”
He instantly answered, “160 workers.”
So I yelled at him, “In grade school I was taught that two times eight equals sixteen. After all these years, do you think I should learn that from you? Do you think I’m a fool?”
Before long, 100 workers were making over 10000 units.
–Taiichi Ohno
July 4, 2009 - 7:56 am
The publisher’s page for Learning to See (Rother and Shook) is here, and lists related resources:
http://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedProductID=9
July 1, 2009 - 8:33 am
Hi David,
That is going to be my next blog post
I needed to get this one out first though! Watch this space…
Karl
July 11, 2009 - 6:55 pm
C’mon, if we follow this road, we may add “energized work” and other common sense agile values. Kanban should be kept as lean as possible
July 1, 2009 - 8:55 am
Thanks Corey.
That sounds like moving to more of a CONWIP system?
Karl
July 1, 2009 - 3:44 pm
I like hybrids where there are pooled segments chained together e.g. fuzzy-front-end -> engineering -> operations.
July 1, 2009 - 5:35 pm
Nice quote. So did Toyota achieve that improvement by reducing kanban, or improving throughput with the same kanban?
July 2, 2009 - 3:12 am
Probably some of both, depending on where the improvement opportunities were. The more trained people you have, the easier it should be to find people to perform multiskill operations. It could be that all of the new workers were applied to new flow processes that reduced both cycle time and kanban.