Writing your Blog using Kanban – Part #1
I’ve been asked on more than occasion how do I keep up with my blogging. So I’ll let you in on a little secret. I use Kanban. Now, you may find this hard to believe, but I find that Kanban can be used for almost anything. Kanban is a powerful tool, that helps you see what you need to get done, and how to control the load, both of which make sure that you get things done, and deliver value quickly. Well, when we don’t have a lot to do, and you’ve got stuff to blog about, there’s usually no problem.
September 5, 2012
At a training session in Kitchener Waterloo, Canada. I was asked how to visualize and handle cycles in a Kanban board. The images below show a way to do it as a physical board and on an electronic board such as Swift Kanban. Tickets within a cycle move from left to right, from one column to the next until and cycle back as many times as necessary and once done they move to the Done column at the the end of the cycle. Note that columns inside the cycle can contain their own Done columns.
I was part of a very interesting discussion at a Silicon Valley high-tech giant a couple of weeks back that focused on doing Agile with distributed teams. We discussed several aspects of Scrum/ XP practices in distributed teams – and it turned out one of the main (some said “the only!”) challenges was the ability to run a Daily Standup meeting well! Having been part of conference calls, WebEx meetings and other virtual gatherings for the longest time, this surprised me somewhat. So, in the last week’s Kaizen Camp Seattle Un-conference, I decided to do a session on that exact same topic. 
Organizations new to Kanban that have no experience with Agile usually find it easier to design their boards than those with Agile background because Kanban recommends the board to reflect the actual process rather than an abstraction. This is a good start. As we all know, a project’s behavior changes over time. This means the Kanban board should keep up with those changes, but unfortunately many Kanban organizations…
Just like everything else, translating a book using Kanban methodology is about the mindset, good communication and good team work. The bulk of the work was performed by the Spanish team, while we acted mainly as advisers committed to give early feedback when required. The initial draft was done extremely quickly, and the final version was approved a few days later.
At Digité/ Swift-Kanban, we had a great visit to the 
