I’m relatively new in my current job — working on 6 months now. I was speaking with another manager and the conversation drifted to the first changes my team implemented after I joined. But, as every good change agent knows, before you implement changes, you have to orient and observe.

When I came aboard, my team had a sizable backlog and every feature request and bug report was assigned out to members of my team of 8. New items came in daily and items were assigned as soon as they…

In a Kanban system you introduce WIP limits at each step of the value flow. This means, that if you get stuck at any one step in the flow and things are not moving forward, then all those who operate in earlier stages of the system enter a holding pattern. If you’re explaining Kanban to managers or executives, this is usually the point that makes them take a sharp turn off of the Lean highway! They mentally write off the whole concept of Kanban because “they don’t want anyone sitting idle.”…

When I last posted on this blog, I was about to depart for the House of Mouse. Yep, DisneyWorld. The Magic Kingdom, to be precise. You might wonder why i’m blathering on about my vacation in my Kanban blog. However, an amusement park is the perfect place to find Kanban happening out in the wild. Talk about your EverydayKanban! For our case study, let’s look at roller coaster ride. But, first, a key to get our parallels drawn……

One of the reasons many groups implement Kanban is to figure out how to deliver more consistently. Kanban, as well as many other methods/processes, is often chosen and implemented by the management or leadership layer and the values and goals are communicated down to developers or other individual contributors.

Part of the discussion between management and developers will focus on then end goal of streamlining cycle times as much as possible in order to deliver more consistently. This…

Hey delivery team, customer, project manager… what do you value? What I value has evolved over time. At one point I couldn’t have succinctly answered that question. Now it is crystal clear and seems like the pinnacle of common sense for a manager of a delivery team like me.

I value finishing work over starting work.

This simple realization has completely changed my viewpoint on how I approach nearly all aspects of my job. Now that I have had this…