Designing an Enterprise Portfolio Kanban Board
Our EKB (Enterprise Kanban Board) has gone through 5 major revisions over the last year. We started our using a traditional Kanban board to measure flow and on-boarded all work across all departments. Originally we were tracking projects only and then expanded into tracking MMFs (minimal marketable features) with the goal of figure out our capacity and throughput. We wanted to get to a state where teams would be able to establish a monthly throughput and them long-term plan accordingly. What...
Read MorePlaying Get Kanban with an Experienced Team
One of my most popular posts is “Kanban Isn’t the Point” where I wrote about the four stages of competence and how people may flow through the stages with respect to learning Kanban. Recently I had the opportunity to run the Get Kanban game with an experienced team that has been using Kanban for quite some time and it was interesting to hear the different types of discussions that were generated compared to when I’ve run the game with people new to Kanban. Shocking, I...
Read MoreIs Kanban Really Less Disruptive?
Kanban is often referred to as an ‘evolutionary approach to change‘. The approach taken with Kanban is to make visible the current state of the existing process and existing work. From there flow work through your system, measure it and then look for, and fix, problems. Yes that is an over-simplification and my explanation isn’t the point of this post. Many people have written about Kanban being a gentler approach to change because it’s less disruptive and...
Read MoreHacking Best Practices
During my Agile 2012 session with Don Gray, one of the disgruntled participants, who was appalled that we were making them think, wanted to know what the Agile best practices are. Don and I both replied the same way. It depends. If you’re in a 20 person organization, your people go out for team lunch every week, people in the organization are friends outside of work and you have one product to develop, your best practice is Scrum. Maybe. Given the scenario I described, that paints a...
Read MoreKanban isn’t the Point
I was Kanban-a-lizing an existing process with HR today. As we are making software delivery processes visible with Kanban, HR decided they wanted to give it a shot and visualize their work. This particular department has about 30 people and their responsibilities range from HR to Learning and Performance to Change Managment, Talent Aquisiton and more. As we talked about the work, it was clear the work was highly variable, somewhat unpredictable and subject to big batching. For example, they...
Read MoreGet Lean Change
