Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
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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, where he described his process …
David Harvey posted a brilliant piece on his blog entitled “The Scrum Picture is Wrong”. I highly recommend reading it. His ideas and suggestions for an alternative Scrum picture got me thinking about how to visualise Lean and Agile software development in a process or label agnostic way. David’s picture looked like a figure of eight, and there seemed to …
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 Coplien at Scan-Agile, after (but …
Agile2009 provided me with 3 sources of ideas which all complemented each other, and which I think make an important point that I want to repeat. Firstly, on the flight over, I read John Shook’s blog post about his work with Starbucks. In it, he responds to the suggestion that by advising Starbucks on using Lean methods, he is transforming …
I’m just about recovered from Agile 2009, and about to disappear off the grid for a much needed break in the sun. Before I do so, I wanted to jot down my immediate reflections on the conference while they were still fresh. The conversations in between sessions are always great at the Agile conferences, but this year, I think these …
Mark Stringer gave me some good feedback recently, that I clearly hadn’t described what I meant be Cadence at the recent miniSPA conference. In order to try and correct that, I thought I’d try and clarify with a blog post that it not simply variable length iterations. The purpose of a cadence is to establish a reliable and dependable capability …
I did a re-run of Kanban. Flow and Cadence at miniSPA yesterday after being selected as one of the best sessions from the main SPA conference this year. I’ve just uploaded the slides on my downloads page. I had some good and appreciative feedback, and Mark Stringer has bee good enough to post some of his thoughts. I’m always glad …
I was chatting with Benjamin Mitchell recently on the way back from the recent Skillsmatter event at the BBC and said something along the lines of, “I think in terms of Kanban, even when I teach Scrum”. I’ve been mulling over that idea more recently and decided that its a good analogy. Kanban and Scrum are just like different languages. …
I recently wrote what I considered to be the four primary practices of a Kanban System for Software Development: Map the Value Stream Visualise the Value Stream Limit the Work in Progress Establish a Cadence During subsequent discussions on the aspect of Continuous Improvement in a Kanban System, I decided that there was a missing fifth primary practice: Reduce the …
Back in January, I wrote a Kanban Sidebar for an upcoming book on Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley. The book is now out in beta, and I have updated the sidebar as part of the review process. I found it interesting to see how my thinking has evolved over the last few months. A Kanban System for …