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Kanban Your Backlog
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Most people think of a backlog as a vertically scrolling to-do list, usually stuffed with items that haven’t been started yet. But that image is misleading—and limiting. Yes, a backlog is a to-do list. But it’s more than that. It’s a constantly evolving, prioritized collection of valuable work that hasn’t been pulled…
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Flow, Lead, and Cycle Time
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Depending on who you read or what training class you take, these three things: may be presented as three different things with distinct definitions. For example, in the SAFe® definition, flow time is defined as any sort of measure from start to finish of processing, lead time is from concept…
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Stop Doing Annual Reviews
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Performance reviews are common in most companies, but they consistently fail to deliver meaningful business value. Everyone knows it—employees dread them, managers hate giving them, and yet businesses continue this outdated ritual. Almost a third of companies have left them behind, including giants like Apple. It’s past time you seriously…
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Fast, Cheap, or Good – Pick One
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Businesses have three fundamental optimization paths: Performance (Good). Products are crafted to be superior in quality, surpassing all competitors. This path prioritizes excellence over speed or cost, leading to expensive inputs, premium labor, and longer production times. Speed and expense become secondary concerns, sacrificed willingly to maintain unmatched quality. Speed…
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Rethinking Retrospectives: Moving Beyond WWW/TALA
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Retrospectives are one of the most widely discussed aspects of Scrum. There are virtual whiteboard templates, tools that attempt to automate information gathering, and entire books dedicated to different models and techniques for making retrospectives engaging and effective. Yet, despite all this guidance, most Scrum teams default to the same…
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Project Management != Waterfall
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When people discuss software development approaches, they tend to use two words as opposites: Agile and Waterfall. When trying to describe a failed adoption of agility in their organization, they tend to use any number of pejorative terms including Wagile, Scrumfall, and Water-Scrum. These terms describe situations where waterfall and…
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Scrum Master Level Up II
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In a previous article titled Scrum Master Level Up, I listed 18 books that I recommend you read to develop your knowledge beyond the training course you may have been given at your company to start you on this path. My recommendations included: A More Advanced Path These books are…
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Focus Feedback on Behavior
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As a manager, you are charged with developing, overseeing, and caring for human beings. This includes delivering constructive, clear, concise, and easily understood feedback. Unfortunately, one of the greatest workplace tragedies of the last century is the prevalence of managers who substitute legitimate feedback with name-calling, criticism, opinions, complaints, hidden…
KANBAN
Kanban Fundamentals
Four Dimensions of Status in Kanban
The Power of Cycle Time
How to Improve Cycle Time
Scrum or Kanban
How to take over any Organization with Kanban
Item Aging
Flow, Lead, and Cycle Time
Kanban Your Backlog
LEAN
Limits on WIP Limits
Small Batch Size
Do Nothing Which is of No Use
Continuous Improvement
Increase Capacity by Reducing Rework
Fast, Cheap, or Good – Pick One
PROJECT MANAGEMENT