Category Archives: lean
Stop Starting, Start Finishing
The phrase in the title is a well-known Agile phrase, but perhaps not well-enough known. In one way, it is saying: minimize WIP. Work-in-process or work-in-progress. In another way, it is saying what my friend Mike Vizdos says: Focus. #Deliver. _____________________________________ But let me tell a story that gives a different meaning. A few months […]
Balancing the work in the Sprint (coding vs testing)
Dean asks: Your Lean Agile Training website content has provided some great insight in helping me improve my agile principles and practices. There is one thing I haven’t been able to clear out of my mind. Perhaps there is a principle I’m not applying or a light bulb hasn’t come on. I haven’t come across […]
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 […]
Lean-Agile Resources
We have put together some Lean-Agile Resources on these pages. These include: books, articles, videos, blogs, LinkedIn groups, etc, etc. Please give us your feedback and suggestions.
High Priority Interrupt Work in Scrum
Imagine that you have new, high priority work, that gets identified during the sprint. In other words, you don’t even know many of the stories or issues or tickets until after the Sprint Planning Meeting. A support team is a classic example of this. How do you organize things in Scrum to handle this? The […]
Kanban Ideas
We have been talking about Kanban a bit lately in other venues. Let’s talk about some key Kanban ideas in Scrum. 1. Do the most important thing first. In Scrum, we want the Product Owner to order the work (the PBIs or User Stories) mainly by Business Value. (Yes, I talk about ‘ordered’, but this […]
Six Myths of Product Development
Here is an HBR article : Six Myths of Product Development. By Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertsen. Here are the fallacies (or myths) in one list: High utilization of resources will improve performance. Processing the work in large batches improves the economics of the process. Our plan is great; we just need to stick to […]
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 […]
JIT Knowledge Creation
This is our business. JIT (just-in-time) knowledge creation. (It is not just-in-time knowledge management.) Why? And why is it so important? Well, ultimately the answer is because people are important. Or maybe it is better to say we respect the customer, the firm’s shareholders. What do I mean, you say? Let’s start from the beginning. […]
An Intro to Business Value Engineering
On June 30, 2010, while I was in Montreal giving a CSM course, I joined the Scrum User Group and gave a new, somewhat different, presentation on BV engineering. The group seemed to like it, so I am making the point in a more practical, concrete way. Click here to see my presentation.