- 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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- Wrong WIP Limits Will Kill Your Options At Lean Agile Scotland 2013 Chris Matts mentioned that the WIP limits kill the options. He didn't really explain his statement in detail but I had been thinking about it and I dare to say that Chris was half right. He often talks about staff liquidity as well, which tells us how likely our staff will be able to work on a problem or a feature.
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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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- 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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- 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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- 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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