Category: Kanban
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A Kanban Team Retrospective Activity
Although Kanban does not prescribe retrospectives (nor any other mandatory meeting) all our Kanban teams are doing retrospectives on a regular basis. As a facilitator of a retrospective you should try to create an awareness of why things went well or not so well and let the team discuss issues that hopefully lead to improvement…
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Learning Playfully: Kanban Lead Time, Spectral Analysis Chart, Service Level Agreement
Some team members are at war with Kanban metrics (and probably other metrics): What are Lead and Cycle Time for? What does a Spectral Analysis Chart (SAC) show? Why should we care at all about a Service Level Agreement (SLA)? (Especially when there are so many dependencies with other teams.) You can always quote David…
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“Sexy Not-So-Sexy Tasks” Retrospective Activity
In one of the last retrospectives a team member complained about the “not very sexy” tasks the team had to do. Well, we all know that life is not all beer and skittles. Nevertheless I think, the team member was actually pointing out, that the “sexiness” of tasks can have impact on the general motivation…
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Soft Agile Transition: Slowly from nowhere to Scrum
Lean Thinking is what I’m trying to learn and adopt at the moment. What a perfect coincidence that I stumbled over Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. On page 54 they describe Kaizen, one of the crucial Lean Principles, as a plausible “inspect…
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Visualizing Kanban Lead Time
Measuring the lead time is one of the three core means of Kanban (next to Workflow visualization and WIP limitation). But whereas Workflow visualization and WIP limitation are easy to understand for the team, I experienced that nobody really cares about what to do with Measuring the Lead Time. This week I tried a different…
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3 Retrospectives in 2 Days
Last week I had retrospectives with three different agile teams within 2 days. I love retrospectives and a retrospective meeting is one of the first agile things I try to establish when I start working with a team. Every team needs to get used to the advantages of retrospectives though… The agenda for retrospectives always…