Kanban, Flow and Cadence News

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 …

Kanban Is My First Language

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. …

Does Kanban Respect People, Self Organisation and Continuous Improvement

There has been a lot of talk recently about whether Kanban Systems for Software Development include the need to respect people, and allow self organisation and continuous improvement. It is true that the community has primarily focussed on the mechanics of Kanban Systems. I believe that this is because it is the mechanics that are the differentiating factors, and thus …

The Fifth Primary Practice of Kanban

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 …

A Kanban Sidebar – Take 2

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 …

How Is Kanban Different From Other Approaches?

There has been a lot of discussion recently around trying to define what Kanban is. Is it a tool? A process? A philosophy? During a discussion on the kanbandev list, Ron Jeffries led me (probably unintentionally) to an idea for a different way of trying differentiate Kanban from other Agile approaches. Rather than attempt a direct comparison and identification of …

Lean & Kanban Conferences – Looking back and looking forwards

Its a month now since the Lean & Kanban Conference in Miami and I haven’t had chance to blog about it. There’s probably not much I can add that hasn’t been said elsewhere already. It was an incredible week; stimulating, inspiring, focussed, energising. I learned a lot, and made and met old and new friends. For those who couldn’t make …

Zurich Lean Agile Scrum Slides

I have posted my slides for the talk I did at the Zurich Lean Agile Scrum event on my downloads page. Inspired by the quality of some of the “Zen” presentations at the Lean & Kanban Conference in Miami, I created a new deck, and included some more slides on some Lean history. I have added some notes to the …

Isn't Kanban Just a Task-board?

While the word Kanban comes from the Japanese for “visual card”, the term Kanban as used by the Kanban Software Development community, represents much more than a standard task-board, or team-board. Additionally, the Kanban Software Development community have not tried to replicate the mechanism of the Toyota Production System kanban tool exactly, but have taken the underlying principles in order …

Anxiety or Boredom Driven Process Improvement?

At the SPA conference recently, Joseph Pelrine talked about “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi. The ideas behind this struck a chord with me as a way of describing something I originally said when discussing whether kanban is only suitable for mature teams. That is that rather than focusing on being Agile which may (and should) lead …