- Agicon - One Does Not Simply Improves without Visualisation I gave a talk at the Agicon 2016 conference about Kanban, focusing mostly on visualisation and how it can help to improve different kind of organisations from startups to large enterprises. You can find the slides here.
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- Debrecen Tech and Startup Meetup - What Scrum, Kanban, and Lean Have Ever Done for Us? I gave my last talk at the Debrecen Tech and Startup Meetup for a local community about how Scrum, Kanban, and Lean can help small or startup companies achieve their success. Scrum, Kanban, and Lean are very good at improving processes, which we need for fast delivery, and Agile/Lean UX to find the right product to deliver, so I put emphasis on these parts.
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- Agilia Conference 2016 The next Agilia Conference is around the corner with exceptional speakers such as Tom Gilb, Scott W. Ambler, Łukasz Węgrzyn, and Pierre E. Neis. Aguarra - the organizer of the conference - is keen on bringing great variety of speakers to its events. For example, last year they had Mario Almondo who is a COO and the Technical Directory of the Ferrari Formula-1 team.
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- Philosophies of Building the Workplace I gave my second talk at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics to psychology students about the philosophies we use to build and improve a workplace. I covered a wide range of topics (Taylor, Kanban, staff liquidity, cynefin, etc.) and promised the students to share some references and further reading materials.
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- Visualize Information Flow in Value Stream Mapping When I met Mary and Tom Poppendieck we not only talked about flow efficiency but about the entity that actually flows through the system. According to Mary it can only be a deriverable.
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- Flow Efficiency Based Improvements Aren't Always Useful Yesterday, I met Mary and Tom Poppendieck and over a nice beer we were talking about various topics but we spent most of our time talking about flow efficiency (ratio of the value added activities to waiting). When I was riding my bicycle home I was still thinking about our conversation and presented examples.
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- London Lean Kanban Day 2014 - The Road to a Fairly Predictable System I see agile software development methodologies (Scrum and XP) and modern management methods (Kanban) as tools for predictability. The development organisation would like to know what is coming and whether it will be the right thing to do. On the other side, the management would like to know when the new features can hit the market.
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- Schedule Portfolio Kanban As a project manager one of my current tasks is risk management, and I have to focus especially on schedule risk. Therefore I was looking for something that can show me quickly the current status of the project and this kind of risk. I started to use a portfolio Kanban board that covers the whole project, but my board is different from Pawel Brodzinski's resource oriented board:I'm using an old idea from Chris Matts - a work item is put into a column that tells us when the it is supposed to be ready -, and the idea of organisational level Kanban boards.
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- Agile Adria Croatia 2014 - The Road to a Fairly Predictable System I see agile software development methodologies (Scrum and XP) and modern management methods (Kanban) as tools for predictability. The development organisation would like to know what is coming and whether it will be the right thing to do. On the other side, the management would like to know when the new features can hit the market.
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- Risk Kanban Board A couple of days ago I was talking with a friend about the talk I gave last year during the Lean Kanban Europe tour and I realised that my unusual Kanban board may be able to solve my recent problem.
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- Constant WIP - CONWIP CONWIP stands for constant work in progress which means that the overall number of work items in the system is limited, not just a single phase or column. For example, with a CONWIP of 6 we can have at most 6 work items between 'todo' and 'done'. Like throughtput, takt time, and flow efficiency CONWIP comes from the car manufacturing world and it was designed for a system that produces the same kind of work item over and over.
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- Improve your Estimations and be More Predictable Planning in general - not just in software development - is not an easy thing. We have to know what to do next and have an idea when it will be ready. Although the former is harder the latter seems to be more problematic. We also struggled with it with my old team at Digital Natives.
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- Aging Work Items In my throughput post I was writing about a piled up inventory of work items which is created when the throughput (output) is lower than the demand (input). These work items are visible, they are on the Kanban board, and we call them aging work items.
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- One Reason Why WIP limits Matter There are different reasons why limiting the work in progress (WIP limit) is a good thing, but now I would like to talk about one special case where WIP limits are helping move things forward. Let's assume that you have a working pull system which means that the team members don't push the work on others, but others can take the work if they are capable to handle them (I'm not using the word free on purpose because what if somebody can work on two things in parallel).
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- Throughput When I started to use the Kanban method there were two measures.
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- Using Takt Time to Find Problems Earlier The idea of takt time comes from car manufacturing. It shows the elapsed time between two completely assembled cars leaving the factory floor. If the takt time is 2 hours, it means that the factory produces 12 cars a day (24h/2h = 12). With the use of takt time people in car manufacturing can detect problems in production earlier.
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- Flow Efficiency Last year in the Lean Kanban University conference series I was talking about flow efficiency and how we measured and used it with one of my old teams. My friend Chris McDermott asked me to write a post about it, so here it comes. Like other metrics such as cycle time, takt time, and throughput, flow efficiency comes from car manufacturing.
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- The Kanban Board is a Mirror When I hear the expression we need to change our Kanban board - it happens quite often -, I think about the analogy between a mirror and a Kanban board.
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- Lean Kanban UK 2013 - I Broke the WIP Limit Twice, and I'm Still on the Team Starting over requires us to do at least two things; re-learn the principles and practices, and look for examples on how others recovered. I believe that understanding the pull system, the WIP limits, and the difference between manufacturing and software development will give us enough to recover faster from failures and accelerate the learning process.
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- I broke the WIP limit TWICE, still on the team - slides I've finally uploaded the slides for my I broke the WIP limit TWICE, still on the team talk. I gave this talk at Lean Kanban France and at Make Better Decisions with Modern Management Methods (a.k.a. Lean Kanban the Netherlands 2013), and will give it at the same branded conference in London in a week (a.
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- 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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- About Flows and Infinite Queues An infinite queue is a column on the Kanban board somewhere between the Queue and Live columns, one that doesn't have a WIP limit and into which one can put many work items as one wants. A column without a WIP limit sounds like a bad practice, because if there is no WIP limit what will ensure that the work items are moving - being pulled - forward.
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- The Optimal Batch Size If you have read the coin game post (in case you haven't, click here, read it - it is a quick and good read by the way -, and come back), you may wonder why the batch size of 6 produced the shortest completion time in the example game. Let's find out.
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- The Coin Game Today's post is about the Coin Game. It is a repetitive group game in which the players have to move a heap of coins from one part of the table to another by passing the coins to each other. Additionally, when a player receives a coin, she has to turn it over once.
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- When Will It Be Done? I recently had to have my watch repaired. I brought it to the watch shop where it turned out that it could not be fixed, because a main part needed to be completely replaced, but they didn't have any spare parts. The lady behind the counter told me that she had no idea how much time it would take to get it.
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- Be Aware of the Three Columns You most probably have seen the simplest Kanban board with three columns.
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- Liquidity for Kanban Systems, My First Look In his keynote at the Lean Kanban Central Europe 2012 conference David J. Anderson proposed a new metric for Kanban Systems, which is supposed to provide an answer to the big organizational governance question.
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- The Hidden Inventory A couple of days ago, I had a quick conversation with an old friend of mine about the place of done columns - also known as inventories - on the Kanban board. He wanted to know if the internal done column - where the work items that have been completed in that phase are kept -, or the internal queue column - where the work items done in the previous phase -, was the better option.
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- There is a Difference Between Effective and Efficient I try not correct people when they talk, but when we are in the middle of a Lean transition, it is important to see the difference between effective and efficient and use these adjectives properly. Most of the people I'm in touch with are non-native English speakers and this could make it difficult to see the difference, because these concepts may be described with the same word in their native language.
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- The Problems of the Capacity Utilization I found a very interesting quote that I wrote in one of my notebooks a long time ago.
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- Waste in Software Development In my community, we love to say the word waste - from lean - out loud. There isn't a meeting without mentioning it at least once, and when it is mentioned, the phrase we have to eliminate waste follows. This is something that is very easy to say.
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- The Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group is One Year Old It is always a great thing to meet the local Lean and Kanban community in Budapest, and this latest event was even more special, because our local group just became one year old. Happy Birthday!After my talk about Agile and Lean in software maintenance environment, we had a delicious cake and a great discussion about how to adapt certain Agile and Lean principles in maintenance projects and we also shared several practical ideas.
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- My Second Public Speaking in Transylvania Next Tuesday will be the second time for me to give a talk for a local Meetup community in Transylvania. Last year, I talked at the Cluj Napoca Agile Supporters Meetup and next week, I'm visiting the newly formed Agile community of Targu Mures. I'm bringing a new talk, which covers the original purposes of the Agile movement, some pragmatic examples and the mindset one needs for a successful business.
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- ACCU 2012 The last weeks were a bit busy and I didn't have the chance to share my slides from ACCU2012, but now I have some time, so here they are.
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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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- Speaking at ITREND 2011 I was invited to a local conference called ITREND 2011, where I talked about how to use customer diversity analysis, Kanban and eXtreme Programming in order to have less unexpected business changes in one's organisation. I was really looking forward to this event because of two reasons: first, it was held in my hometown Miskolc, Hungary at the University where I studied and work, and second, I finally saw a chance to tell students about recent software development methods, because I knew that this topic wasn't covered in their curriculum.
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- Visit at Cluj Napoca My old friend Victor invited me to Cluj Napoca, Romania to talk about software development in practice. There were three talks in the morning at his company evoline and a fourth talk late afternoon at the local meetup group. We started the day with an introduction to Kanban, because the audience knew about Agile, but Kanban was something new, and additionally we needed it for the maintenance-related presentation: Kanban Basics for Beginners Revised from Zsolt Fabok After a short break we continued with a longer talk about maintenance and how to use Agile, Lean, Kanban and leadership techniques in order to stabilise a maintenance situation: Kanban Basics for Beginners Revised from Zsolt Fabok The last presentation was about how to use Agile techniques without saying Agile: Agile in Stealth Mode from Zsolt Fabok My talk at the meetup became a bit longer than I expected, but we had - at least I felt like that - a great discussion how the software development process evolved at Digital Natives - my current company - and, uniquely, we talked about what we were doing right and where we failed: Evolution of the Software Development Process at Digital Natives from Zsolt Fabok I promised a list of books worth reading.
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- When Expand and Collapse Got Beaten Today's post is an instructive story about mixing various good patterns and ideas. They are very useful separately, but when one uses them together, they may lead to problems which nobody wants to deal with at all. We found several different defects in a certain feature, and in order to reduce handover costs I collapsed them together to make an umbrella defect (defect1+defect2+.
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- Our Detective's Blackboard My colleague Attila and I had an interesting discussion several days ago.
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- Brown Bag Lunch Talk: Measure and Manage Flow This Tuesday, I had my first brown bag lunch talk at prezi, where I talked about measuring and managing the flow. Here are my slides.
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- Meetup: Kanban in 5 Minutes Yesterday evening I gave a 5 minute long lightning talk at Bp New Tech Meetup about Kanban focusing on the measure and manage flow principle. Here are my slides.
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- Third Meetup - Open Space This Wednesday we held the third event of the Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group, which was excellent in my point of view, and we had great discussions. In the beginning we collected the following topics.
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- Physical and Electronic Boards Several weeks ago, I went to a team leader event with @csapoz and Krisz, where - besides other interesting topics - we talked about the usage of physical and electronic Kanban and Scrum boards. At that time I thought that electronic boards were evil - kill communication and collaboration -, but I decided to give a try to their suggestion: use the physical board for tracking and collaboration, and use the electronic board for administration.
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- Reducing Waste in Testing - The Problem Testing is the most important part of any kind of software development methodology, but it is also the most neglected one. Nowadays, when an organisation does testing, it produces such a high amount of waste that the whole development process becomes very expensive, which makes it harder to win projects over the competition and risks the existing relationship with the customer.
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- Personal Kanban Board My friend László shared a picture of his own personal Kanban board.
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- Meetup: Kanban Basics for Beginners Next week, Yuval Yeret will present at the first main event of the Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group. He is going to speak about a bit more advanced topic - scalling Kanban -, so I thought it would helpful to the community to keep an introduction for those, who aren't that familiar with Kanban.
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- Kanban on Organisational Level A couple of days ago, I talked to the head of an organisation, who was having a hard time to get an overview of the current work of her organisation, and struggling to have enough manpower in order to deliver products in time. This is a common problem, I had talked to other leaders who had the same issue, and in fact I was in a similar situation before myself.
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- Weekly - CW18 I'm still a bit busy, but nevertheless here is the collection for calendar week 18, 2011.
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- Weekly - CW14 Without further ado, here is the collection for calendar week 14, 2011.
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- Weekly - CW12 I usually exchange interesting articles, presentations and links with my friends in many different ways. I thought it would be better to use one simple way, so I'm going start a weekly series where I post articles, presentations and links I read during the week and find interesting.
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- The Calm Period We are about six weeks after pimping my team - let's see what has happened since then. A massive change is usually followed by a calm period. During such a period the team adapts to the effects of the change (new environment and methodology) and only small additional changes are applied, something like fine tuning.
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- Pimp my Team ## AbstractFrom the middle of January 2011, our organization has been working in a new structure. There were different outcomes of this change, one of them was that my former firefighting team has been dismissed, and so has the team introduced in my Kanban Nightmares article.
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- XP with Kanban instead of Scrum ## AbstractI'm going to step into a minefield, because in this post, I'm going to share my subjective experiences with Scrum, and I'm going to share the reasons why moved from Scrum to XP + Kanban. I'm using the minefield metaphor, because every single sentence I'm going to share can be exploded with good explanations, mostly from advanced scrum practitioners.
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- Visualize Workflow With DoD Line One of the key principles of Kanban is to visualize the workflow. A common practice for that is to have a Kanban board where the proper phases are visualized. In most of the cases, there is a criterion for moving an item from one phase to another, but this criterion is not written down, or in a better case it is written down, but in a word document or in a wiki article.
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- Daily Stand-up Variations During the last few years I did different kinds of stand-up meetings in Scrum and in Kanban teams. In this post, I'm going summarize the pros and cons I found in them. The most common stand-up meeting style is the daily scrum. In this meeting, the ball or a stick goes around round-robin style.
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- Kanban Nightmares I've mentioned in my previous post that I have less time for coding nowadays. I've started to lead a new team with the intention to introduce Kanban in their way of working. In this post, I'm going to share the result of this introduction. In these last few years I've had opportunities to observe coaches and consultants how they help teams and organizations.
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- Internal Queue Columns I have less time for coding nowadays, because I have to take care of more organizational and coaching activities. Additionally, I really like to investigate small details and check how they can help improve certain situations. So here is yet another post about Kanban and Kanban boards.
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- Internal Done Columns If a team uses a whiteboard to visualize the workflow, it is quite certain that the team has a Done column. The finished user stories, tasks, cards, etc. end up in this particular column. It is usually the rightmost column on the whiteboards. This year I realized that it is not enough to have a Done column only at the end of the whole value stream, but it is good to have one after each phase.
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- Never Move Items Back on a Kanban Board I've been doing Kanban for a while now, and I get the following question almost on a daily basis.
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- Ageing Items on the Board I spotted an interesting phenomenon on our Kanban board recently. There where items on the board which have been there for a long time. These items weren't stopped or blocked, every information was available in order for someone to be able to continue working on them, but no progress, though.
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- More Kanban Numbers For firefighting situations I prefer using the Kanban framework. It is very informative, and generally keeps things under control. If there are a lot of things to do, people tend to do context switching, which makes them less effective than they could be.
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