Category Archives: Kanban

Kanban: Taiichi Ohno quote

As David Anderson notes in his book, one of the best things about Kanban is improvements, continuously getting better. Taiichi Ohno invented the Kanban idea in the 1950’s when he visited Piggly-Wiggly, an American supermarket.  He explains most of this in his book, Toyota Production System. The book has one short section titled: Kanban Accelerates […]

Kanban – Love it. Why?

I have been working on Kanban lately. I love the Lean ideas.  There is so much we still need to do and understand better.  Interestingly, the ideas are counter-intuitive to most people yet, obviously simple and powerful when you take some time to do them. The one sentence version (hugely over-simplified): For most people, I […]

Why I prefer ScrumBan to Kanban

I have spoken about why I like Lean and why I like ScrumBan, a combination of Scrum and Kanban. Some people prefer ‘Kanban’, as it is being called in the software development community.  Sometimes: Kanban Method. To be honest, I think I know what Kanban is in Lean Manufacturing. But I am unsure what ‘Kanban’ […]

Kanban Question

A colleague asks:  “We are an out-sourcing firm and have a client who does not have a Product Backlog. In fact, they often can’t prepare enough items (stories) for even a full Sprint Backlog. (2 week Sprints).  He is not used to Scrum or any other Agile approach. I am thinking of using Kanban with […]

Scrum & Kanban

Jim Coplein today posted a very interesting post on Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum Log.  It’s title is: An Alternative to Kanban: One-Piece Continuous Flow. In the piece, Jim discusses the definitions and merits of Scrum and Kanban. This is a subject about which I too have some passion.  While not as talkative as Jim, I will […]