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Performance vs. Control
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Many organizations default to control mechanisms to mitigate risk, but this focus often undermines performance. A shift toward prioritizing performance is essential for long-term success and competitiveness. In small companies and startups, there is little to lose, so risk aversion has not yet developed. Once a business has grown into…
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How to Improve Cycle Time
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Read the previous article, The Power of Cycle Time to understand what a cycle time is and how to measure it. This article is about what to do once you are taking the cycle time measurements and want to improve it. Here are some recommendations about ways you can speed…
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Scrum and Monopoly
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I always hated playing Monopoly. Any game of monopoly would take forever to play. Right at the moment when I was about to get the upper hand, one of my family members would pass money to someone else, give them a property, or win the big pile of money in…
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Uncertainty
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Predictive planning often fails in large organizations dealing with knowledge work. Unlike physical labor, cognitive tasks are difficult to plan because of uncertainty. The farther out we plan, the more uncertainty increases. There are four main types of uncertainty, often referred to as VUCA: While these conditions rarely affect physical…
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A Visual 2020 Scrum Guide
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Studying for a Scrum Certification? Want a visual reference? Forget the goofy cheat sheets you see on LinkedIn! They almost always leave something out that is very important, or in many cases, they get everything wrong. I made this visual in Mural of everything in the Scrum Guide. The whole…
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One on One Meetings
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I will refer to one one one meetings here at O3’s or 1×1’s. I won’t use the abbreviation OOO since that it typically used to mean Out Of Office. A 1×1 is a private meeting between employee and employer held on a regular cadence that is intended to help develop…
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Limits on WIP Limits
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As a manager, I was trained in something called “resource utilization.” I was frequently asked by the layers of leaders above me to provide them with justification for why the people who worked for me existed. I was asked to report on the number of projects they handled at a…
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The Power of Cycle Time
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Across the business world, people measure things and review charts, graphs, and dashboards of those measures. Too often the measurements we take are counting things in a way that does not help us make decisions. Collecting data and then visualizing it should create transparency that helps with decision making. One…
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