A blog about whatever it's on my mind to foster innovation and improve IT work
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Optical Illusion Movie Posters - Rowan Stocks Moore Takes a Different Look at Disney
trendhunter.com(TrendHunter.com) England-based graphic designer Rowan Stocks Moore has created a series of clever Disney posters. Many of the designs use optical illusions so that multiple images are shown and some are hidden….
Genius!!!!
Kanban for CMMI
Introduces an agile way to implement the CMMI Model
12 ways to apply Kanban in 2012
Kanban is a method for advancing incremental, evolutionary changes in organizations through the adoption of lean principles, which limit work in progress (WIP) and create a pull system where new work can only be started as existing work is completed.
Kanban suggests that organizations start out with the actual state of the their processes and proceed to further develop it in small steps
Kanban is recognized as part of the lean body of knowledge and its chances of being accepted and supported by top management teams are good. In a short period of time, Kanban has emerged to become a method that is used by a growing number of diverse teams and organizations.
Although it is getting mainstream in software development organizations, Kanban may be used in any organization that needs a system for visualizing work, making it flow, reducing waste, and maximizing customer value. Here are some examples where an an organization can leverage Kanban to improve the way it works in 2012 :
- For visualizing and managing the flow of signals, trends and threads resulting from scanning the organization external environment,
- For visualizing and managing the flow of ideas for new product/service development,
- For visualizing the roadmap of projects within a portfolio,
- For visualizing and managing the flow of work in a Project,
- For visualizing the flow of features in Product Development,
- For visualizing and managing the flow of work in app development, from concept to the app store approval,
- For visualizing and managing the flow of content to be published in social media,
- For visualizing and managing the flow in the sales pipeline,
- For visualizing and managing work in help desks and customer support,
- For visualizing and managing the flow of work outsourced to external companies
- For connecting the flow in all the above processes
- For developing a culture of collaboration and continuous innovation
Instead of making large investments in tools and certification programs, organizations can get started with Kanban by investing in no more than people, pens and post-its… a priceless way to start a year.
Open Innovation: The Power of Many
My new article for Cutter is already available, benchmarking the progress in Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing
Scrum & Scrabble = The Scrumble Game
I developed a new game to introduce Scrum in my last training sessions. The Product Backlog is a list of the Scrum framework related terms. Each Sprint the team has to build those terms using letters from the scrabble game. Teams are cross-functional (every team member has competencies to move some vowels and some consonants). During the game they update the work remaining estimates for terms that reuse words already done. It is funny to see how teams solve the impediments resulting from missing letters or lack of competencies to form the words they need.
At the end of the Sprint we only count the points for the words that are Done (yes, we have a definition of done). The team that scores more points with less letters wins.
Beyond Kanban: Lean Principles for Agile Teams
The growing interest about Kanban in the Agile Community seems to reduce Lean to a board to visualize work in process and pull work according to the available capacity.
Lean is more than Kanban as Agile is more than Scrum. Lean has its roots in the auto industry and while its tools and practices may be specific to it, its management principles are broad enough to be understood and applied in any industry, including IT.
Lean can be embodied by the 14 management principles of the Toyota Way just as agile can be described in the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto
By understanding these principles, teams will better equipped to develop learning and adaptive organizations by solving their own problems instead of spending time discussing if Kanban is better than Scrum, without really thinking what is the problem they want to solve by using one of these agile frameworks…or any other …. that’s the difference between “being” lean & agile, or “doing” lean / agile.
The 14 Lean Management principles of the Toyota Way are:
1) Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.
2) Create a continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface.
3) Use pull systems to avoid overproduction
4) Level out the workload
5) Build a culture of stopping to fix problems
6) Standard Work is the foundation for improvement and empowerment
7) Use Visual Controls so no problems are hidden
8) Use reliable technology that serves your people and your processes
9) Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others
10) Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.
11) Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.
12) Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation
13) Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly
14) Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (Hansei) and continuous improvement (Kaizen)
In the next series of posts I will revisit each one of these principles to discuss how they are enacted in agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban
The important thing is not your process, the important thing is the process for improving your process
Henrik Kniberg
