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Model workflow stages – not people or roles

A recent discussion on the leanagile list compared Scrum and Kanban with respect to team swarming.  The suggestion was that swarming doesn’t occur in kanban due to the way work flows from role to another.  This is a common misconception, leading to the perception that kanban is more like waterfall than agile.  Here’s my response. Firstly: I would say that …

Lean & Kanban 2009 Miami Rescheduled

The Lean & Kanban 2009 conference which I promoted (am am speaking at) has been rescheduled to May 6-8.  Its still in the same location in Miami, and the schedule is pretty much the same, although Don Reinertsen is unable to make it.  There are early mutterings of a European based version of the conference towards the end of this …

A Kanban Sidebar

I was kindly asked by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley to write a sidebar on kanban for their upcoming book on Agile Coaching (no links yet).  Here’s what I put together: An alternative approach to planning work in time-boxed iterations is to use a Kanban system. A Kanban system uses physical tokens to limit work in progress and to pull …

Announcing Lean & Kanban 2009 Miami

The Lean & Kanban 2009 conference in Miami (KSE : Miami) is officially open for registration at http://leankanbanconference.com/. Its February 18th-20th at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. From the Flyer: Two and half days featuring a full day of presentations with separate tracks for Lean and Kanban, plus a full day of open space and a half day of lightning talks. …

The Kanban, Flow and Cadence Simulation

I use a simulation when I have time in presentations on Kanban, Flow and Cadence, which I hope makes the ideas a bitter clearer and more concrete.  I was asked if I could make the materials available, so here they are with an explanation.  Its not perfect, and can be slow and time consuming, so I’d love any feedback on …

Kanban and the New New Product Development Game

One of the primary origins of Scrum is “The New New Product Development Game” by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1986.  This is the article in which the contrast is made between a traditional sequential or “relay race” approach and a holistic or “rugby” approach. Hence  the name Scrum was derived.  As part …

Is Kanban Only Suitable for Mature Teams?

Another hot topic around kanban is whether it only suitable to use with mature agile teams. In terms of Shu Ha Ri, is kanban a Ri process, or can it be a Shu, or even Ri process? A good description of Shu Ha Ri can be found here.  To summarise, the concept comes from the Japanese martial art Aikedo and …

Kanban, Flow and Cadence

Intro There has been some noticeable increase in interest in Kanban recently, with a number of people asking for more basic info, and more people writing new blogs and articles.  This is my attempt to describe in more detail my take on it all, which I refer to as Kanban, Flow and Cadence. Kanban – Controlled Work Flow – Effective …

Page Updates

A couple of page updates for the blog: Calendar – I’ve added two new upcoming conferences that I’m going to be speaking about “Kanban, Flow and Cadence” at.  They’re XPDay08 and SPA2009. Kanban – I’ve created a new page to pull together various references on Kanban for Software Development.

Kanban and Retrospectives

Following a couple of threads recently on the kanbandev Yahoo! group, I thought I’d try and put down my experiences and thoughts on the subject. In a timebox-based agile process, such as Scrum or XP, the retrospective typically happens at the end of the iteration, and is one of the items coupled to the iteration cadence.  Removing the iteration, and …