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From KFC Development to PVC Systems

I’ve been revisiting my earlier KFC Development work in light of my more recent focus on five primary practices. This is an brief overview of what’s changed, and what my mental model looks like now. Firstly, I’ve stopped referring to the practices as such, in favour of calling them aspects. Practices always felt slightly wrong, but at the time I …

A Kanban Multiverse – not from LeanSSC Atlanta

I should have been at the LeanSSC Conference in Atlanta this week, but unfortunately Eyjafjallajokull intervened. This is the Prezi I was going to use. It may not make much sense on its own but hopefully gives a flavour of what sort of things I was going to talk about. I’m hoping to put together a post together to flesh …

Defining the Last Responsible Moment

I was involved in a recent twitter discussion with Chris Matts about Lean’s “Last Responsible Moment”, and he set a challenge to come up with a usable definition. Chris’s opinion is that there isn’t one, compared to the Real Options equivalent. This then, is my response to that challenge. I will define the Last Responsible Moment (LRM) in terms of …

Facilitating A Kanban Konversation

As I mentioned in my Scrum Gathering Musings, I came up with a twist on the Goldfish Bowl format which I used during the Kanban Exploration Deep Dive.  Here are some more details. The Goldfish Bowl format works really well for facilitating a focussed discussion with a large number of people. It keeps the active voices to a manageable number, …

Systems Thinking, The Vanguard Method and Software Development

I’ve recently read John Seddon’s “Freedom from Command and Control“, which introduces his approach to Systems Thinking – the Vanguard Method. A few key points really struck home with me and helped clarify my thoughts on some of the challenges I’ve come across recently. First is the following simple diagram, which shows that Management is responsible for defining the System, …

Process Safeguards and Ski Slopes

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 that we can guide them towards …

Kanban Trail Markers

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 the system as part of …

Outcomes and Sync Steps

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 …

A New Lean And Agile Picture

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 …

Is Kanban A Relabeling of Scrum?

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 …