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Going Solo

There is often a time when singers and songwriters who have always been part of a band, decide to pursue a solo project. Well, I feel I can empathise with that situation, and having always worked for someone else, I’ve decided its time to go out on my own. I’m now an independent Lean Agile Consultant, providing services to help …

Kanban Thinking Questions

Questions Kanban Thinking emerged from a realisation that “best practices” are not universal, and that sometimes, continuing to try harder, do better and have more discipline isn’t the right thing to do when those practices are not appropriate. As a result, the challenge became one of how to help people learn and discover their own solutions to the challenges they …

Estimates as Sensors

Note: this is not an April Fool – honest! I’ve been watching the #NoEstimates conversations with interest and decided its about time to pitch in with my own perspective. I don’t want to take any ‘side’ because like most things, the answer is not black or white. Estimates can be used for both good and evil. For me they are useful …

Announcing The Lego Flow Game

I have just published a page for the Lego Flow Game – a new game that I have co-created with Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg. Its based on an ‘experiment’ I originally ran in 2010 at the SPA conference. Then I used an exercise of matching, solving and checking equations to explore and experience workflow with different types of processes and policies. …

The BBC Seeds Of Kanban Thinking

Back in 2002 I wrote an Experience Report for the XP/Agile Universe conference in Chicago – one of the precursors to the current Agile Alliance “Agile 200X” series. The title was “Agile Planning with a Multi-customer, Multi-project, Multi-discipline Team” and the abstract was as follows: Most XP literature refers to teams which work on a single project, over a number …

To Method, Or Not To Method, That Is The Question

This post is a result of pondering on a couple of well know quotes in the Lean and Kanban communities, and the relationship, and potential paradox, between the two of them. The first is from W. Edwards Deming: By what method? The second is from Taichi Ohno: Do not codify method. What’s going on here? Is ‘method’ something these two …

Visual Management – Creating A Kanban Multiverse

This is an article I originally wrote for the Management 3.0 site in 2010. As it is no longer available there, I am republishing it here in its original form other than a few minor edits. At the Lean and Kanban Exchange in London in 2009, I was chatting with David Anderson and David Laribee about the possibilities for Kanban …

Limiting WIP? Or Containing the Work?

I’ve thought for some time now that WIP limits are a special form of explicit policy – one that is called out specifically because it is a core concept behind kanban systems. That has made be uncomfortable with the third Kanban Thinking heuristic; “Limit (with Policies)”. Limits and policies are a means to an end. What is that end (other …

Agile Central Europe Keynote

I’m really honoured to have been asked to give the closing keynote at this year’s Agile Central Europe conference in Kraków, Poland, 15-16 April 2013. ACE has a strong Kanban theme this year and I am going to ask whether Kanban isn’t just commons sense? Kanban: Isn’t it Just Common Sense? Many problems we are trying to solve in software and product development are …

Heuristics for Building the Right Thing

On Monday I had the privilege of spending the day with some really smart people. Organised by Gojko Adjic, other attendees included Chris Matts, Henrik Kniberg, Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Gabby Benefield, Jeff Patton, Aaron Sanders and Olaf Lewitz. The theme of the day was exploring how we can help organisations not just build the “thing right”, but build the “right thing”. …