Insights Archive
All published English LEANability insights from 2018.
TWiG 1.5 is done. The biggest highlight right away: The simulation is now available in 6 languages (English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Russian) and the seventh language (Spanish) is Work in Progress. Many thanks to the TWiG Community for your support! In addition to the languages there are a few smaller and bigger changes
Read article
“Hooray, we have a board and we are doing standups. We are agile!” That would be nice. Many people still think of a board with colourful stickies when they think of agility. And it’s perfectly clear: Visualizing work and workflows on a board is basically a great thing and an important prerequisite for improvement. However,
Read article
You get what you’re optimizing for. Deming has already said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” If we build a work system in which it is important that everyone is working at 100% capacity, then we will get exactly such a system. And now the important point: This does NOT
Read article
Whenever agile methods are introduced into organizations, discussions about “prioritization meetings” revolve quite quickly. Replenishment, planning, grooming, blooming, zooming and whatever they’re all called. It must be made sure as soon as possible how new work gets into the system. My experience says that the subject of “replenishment” can be initially neglected. I’ve never seen
Read article
TWiG – The WiP Game is now available in Russian. Many thanks to Ivan Dubrovin and Aleksei Pimenov for the translation. To be honest, I only see a string of funny symbols when I look at the translation, but I’m sure Ivan and Aleksei did a great job ? If someone else wants to translate TWiG
Read article
How many times during the past conference season have I told you that I gave my presentation somewhere on “Why agile teams have nothing to do with business agility”? A lot, huh? That’s exactly how it feels right now: The last few months have been awesome, but now I’m pretty tired from conferencing. That’s why
Read articleEveryone knows the situation: Someone comes in and says: “We need to make an offer for a project and we need to know when you can finish it”. Or also very high in the race is the question: “Until when can you deliver this feature?” In this episode, I talk to Troy Magennis about how
Read article
First, there was personal productivity. Then, everyone started talking about Agile teams. Today, it’s time to talk about Business Agility. In a recent podcast I talked with Dima Moroz of Kanbanize about how one does get an organization to do the right things at the right time. The trick is to move the most effective levers and
Read articleIn this episode I am talking to Sigi Kaltenecker about the finished Enterprise Kanban Coach (EKC) training in Barcelona. We reflect on how they experienced the training, what Enterprise in EKC actually means and what the six building blocks of Enterprise Kanban Coaching are.
Read articleIn this episode I talk to Karl Scotland about strategy deployment and how to align peoples problem solving skills to the organisations key challenges and opportunities. Karl Scotland helps businesses become Learning Organisations.
Read articleIn this episode I talk to Thomas van der Burg about the development and application of custom-built test methods and equipment for medical devices in a Pharmaceutical Company. Thomas reports how the department has managed to dramatically reduce the lead time on their now almost five-year journey to an agile way of working. They achieved
Read articleIn this episode I speak with Nicolas Mercier and Frédéric Paquet about an Agile transition in a government agency with 12,000 people involved. The initial request was to make 150 teams agile and that’s what they did. However, 150 agile teams is not a real outcome and that’s why Nick and Fred started to work
Read article
I am regularly asked a question during customer visits or training sessions: How do you deal with constant disruption? I have already written about this, such as the blog article on white noise and we cover the topic also in the book Kanban Change Leadership. For many years, though, I more often recommend the “Dude of
Read article
Something is happening in the TWiG country. I have just released version 1.4 . You can download it from the TWiG website. In addition to smaller bug fixes, there are two major changes: (1) Thanks to Florian Meyer, there is a facilitator’s guide, which greatly helps with the simulation setup and (2) the Realization Time
Read articleYou want to know how it works when ~50 development teams with ~900 people in total don’t estimate but know when stuff is going to be finished? Then watch episode 024 #continuouseForecasting of Lean Business Agility with Prateek Singh. Prateek Singh is Principal Agile Coach at Ultimate Software in South Florida, USA. Subscribe to the
Read articleIt’s been a year since the first video was published in my Video Blog Lean Business Agility. What is more obvious than to draw an annual balance.
Read articleKlaus Leopold publishes a simulation to experience WIP-limited pull systems. The simulation is licensed with Creative Commons and can be downloaded for free.
Read articleMore than anyone else, project leaders and mangers ask me again and again one question: “Does a Kanban board replace a project plan?” The answer is, as is often the case with me, “It depends.” First of all, a plan mostly describes the timeframe of a project in advance. The question is for which type
Read articleWhen a day like 31st December happens to be a Sunday, you are very unlucky if living in Austria. Grocery stores are usually closed Sundays with only a few exceptions. Those exceptions already tend to be crowded on ordinary Sundays, and even more so if it is New Year’s Eve. All the people who didn’t
Read articleI know, I’m a bit late. The German version of “Practical Kanban” was already released in November 2016. But that doesn’t change the fact that the first year of my second book was full of motivating and – I have to admit – flattering feedback and reviews. It took another year to translate the book […
Read article