Lean, Agile, Visual Management from the Trenches
In a blog post called Kanban Cadences, David Anderson laid out a set of 7 Kanban cadences or meetings that provide comprehensive opportunities for feedback, planning, and review in an enterprise. Some of these were already identified in his original blue book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, some were identified later and put together in this post.
With the digital disruption of business models and whole industries, business executives and process owners are faced with a variety of transformation challenges. The need and pressure to deliver and demonstrate improved performance metrics, transparency and collaboration are greater than ever.
At the most fundamental level, ESP was necessary to provide a container for the collection of things we were teaching that were beyond kanban systems and beyond the scope of the Kanban Method. These were the things that enabled the optimal and effective use of kanban systems – topics such as: probabilistic forecasting and statistical analysis; qualitative risk assessment; real option theory; connecting strategy to operational mechanisms such as Kanban capacity allocation; and so forth. ESP represents a system of management for an entire professional services business.
We have introduced two new usability and functional enhancements with the SwiftKanban August update: Highlighting Card Fields, Analytics and Reports Filter.
Competitiveness in the age of digital disruption requires businesses to achieve agility at scale – not in select projects and portfolios alone, but across functions, across the business. The approaches to achieving enterprise-wide agility are keenly debated. I caught up with Kanban pioneer David Anderson on the sidelines of Lean Kanban Central Europe and Lean Kanban India last year and asked him about his thoughts. Here are some interesting highlights from there.
With the release of SwiftKanban July update, we have introduced new functional enhancements, Enhanced Card Designer, Exporting Cards Hierarchy, Comment on Multiple cards Simultaneously. Read more…
Last week, my colleague Navin and I had the pleasure and – indeed – the honor of meeting some of the best minds in Europe at the Kanban Leadership Retreat at Mayrhofen, Austria!
I have seen people focus a lot on what the WIP limit should be for a Value Stream stage of a Kanban system. However, once the WIP limit is known, I haven’t seen much thought going into where to put those WIP limits. Hence, this blog!
When I first arrived in the US twenty years back I was “blown-away” by a few intense experiences that are still etched fresh in my mind. One such overwhelming experience was when I entered Wal-Mart for the first time. I had never seen or imagined anything like this before. For every item, there were so many brands, packages, and choices. Buying even insignificant stuff was a complex and stressful experience.
One of the questions that working professionals get asked the most is “When will my request be completed?” In order to answer, we often look at lead time metrics to give a predictable answer. Looking at lead times over a period of time can give us a pretty high confidence level in setting delivery expectations. It is a strategy for predictability.
When we look at improving those lead times, we often focus on how to improve the active work we do for the requests we receive.
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