Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
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 …
After over a year of blogging, I finally decided that it was time to move off wordpress.com and invest in an independently hosted version that gave me some more flexibility. So today I bit the bullet and grabbed availagility.co.uk (availagility.wordpress.com is being redirected, so all the old links should work). If you see anything which looks odd, or find any …
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 …
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 thereafter. Places strictly …
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 have a schedule …
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 I’d been on my laptop. …
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 have structured the description around …
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 …