- Does the WIP Limit Have to Match the Demand? At the Kanban Leadership Retreat 2013, Janice Linden showed us the Why limiting work in progress makes sense (Kanban)? video by David Lowe. Later on, David asked me about the video, so I had a closer look. (You may want to check his video before continuing reading.
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- The Lead Time Is The Time The Customer Must Wait to Get What She Asked For The lead time plays an important role in the Kanban method and yet the Kanban community is working with different definitions. We agree that the lead time is a time interval, but when we talk about where it starts and where it ends, the answer is almost always it depends or we measure it differently.
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- Convince Your Manager to Try out the Product Ask your boss or manager to try out the product you are working on. If she has already been doing it, you can stop reading now, and please go and tell her that I like what she is doing and she should keep it up. If the situation is the other way around then there is something important you have to do: convince her to try out and use the product you are working on.
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- The Customer is Not Even Close to Us Not a long time ago, a colleague told me that our project was much better than his, because according to him, our customer was close to us. This sentence got me thinking and I'm pretty sure the customer is not close to us at all. The customer is close when you, as a team member, can directly interact with her.
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- One Track Development A couple of weeks ago, an interesting question appeared on the pm.stackexchange.com site about how to deal with defects across multiple development tracks when the development follows the iterative model. My answer was to introduce one-track in the way of working, and I promised to write a bit more about it.
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- When Local Optimization Won't Make a Difference A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned at the office during my measure and manage flow in practice talk that we should invest more in optimizing the whole flow and reduce the effort spend on local optimizations. In retrospect, I didn't spend too much time on explaining why, because it had a very loose connection to the subject of the talk, and I assumed that the audience would understand what I meant anyway.
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- Visualize the Flow on the Highest Possible Level I gave an internal workshop about Kanban a couple of days ago, and the colleagues who were there looked enlightened when I mentioned that Kanban should visualize the whole process, because this is the place where it can help the most. Don't get me wrong, it is also fine to have Kanban on the team level, but the real optimization and improvement should happen on the highest possible level.
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- Increase Customer Satisfaction with the Kano Model A couple of weeks ago I had a great discussion with one of my colleagues about the Kano model and how we could use it to make better deliveries. The model itself is a classification of features of a product based on customer needs and attributes. It was created by Professor Noriaki Kano (on the right) in the 1980s.
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- Make the Customer Try Out Your Product I've been participating in demo meetings with customers and product owners for years now, but we seldom talked about interesting things or rarely made significant decisions during these meetings. There can be several explanations to that, but I'm pretty convinced that we were doing these meetings wrong.
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- Customer Diversity Last year at xp2010 Scott E. Page talked about the benefits of diversity inside an organisation. According to Scott, diversity improves the performance and decision making process of an organisation. Today late afternoon I attended a startup meetup event where Patrick Vlaskovits talked a bit about the diversity among customers.
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