Are you struggling to plan your Christmas in an efficient way? We have provided a solution for you to overcome this with a Kanban board. A Kanban board is a workflow visualisation tool that enables you to optimise and manage the flow of your work. If you are a beginner in using a Kanban board or have never used one yourself check out our previous blog on ‘How to use a Kanban board’.  There are many benefits to using a Kanban Board such as:

- Providing visibility across the team

- Reduces overburdening

- Helps with communicating better

- Encourages better quality of work

Out of the various Agile frameworks and methods out there, today’s blog post focuses on Kanban. More specifically, on how to use one of the most popular techniques for the visual management of your workflow: the Kanban Board.

What is Kanban?

Let us start with what Kanban is not:

• Kanban is not a project management methodology.
• Kanban is not a product development lifecycle process.

So, what is Kanban?

This blog is a case study of an Agile implementation which started off as a classic Scrum implementation, and then evolved to use Scrumban and Kanban techniques.

In the Beginning.

It is day 1 of sprint 1 for a team.  

To set some context, a Business Analyst had spent several months preparing a product backlog of nicely written user stories. They were conveniently written in the user story format:

‘As a <who>’

‘I want <what>’.

Written by Alex Gray

When I am training Scrum courses, I often like to ask attendees: ‘Is anyone using Kanban’? More often than not, a number of people on the course will say ‘Yes we have Kanban boards’. So I say: ‘Great! Have you mapped your workflow on your board, and are you applying WIP (Work In Progress) limits?’ To which the answer repeatedly is ‘No, we just use a Kanban board’.

What follows next is that I am asked to explain the difference between Scrum and Kanban. Which is when I normally get the question: ‘Should we use Scrum orKanban?’

Let’s look at some of the possible deciding factors.

Having recently relocated with our young family back to the UK from Catalonia-is-not-Spain was a real challenge. Also, changing sector from international online traveling tourism to an Agile specialist provider was a steep learning curve. In this post I’ll share with you an unexpected find of mine. Hint: it involves Agile and primary school kids.

The first SAFe Leadership was held between 26-29 May in Crieff, Scotland.

SAFe Leadership had the stated aims of:

• Share ideas and experiences from a broad range of SAFe practitioners
• Provide input into the direction of SAFe
• Build our community.

Over 40 thought leaders from around the globe, including America, Brazil, Australia, Israel and Europe descended on Crieff in Scotland for the inaugural SAFe Leadership retreat to discuss latest thinking, the imminent release of SAFe 4.0 and the new ideas in the Cost of Delay.

And yes, that is a question! In fact, here is another question:

“Where in the PRINCE2 manual does it stipulate a traditional (waterfall) way to deliver projects?”

So is PRINCE2 that alien to an Agile approach?

Well, let’s have a look at the seven core principles of PRINCE2

• Continued business justification,
• Learn from experience,
• Defined roles and responsibilities,
• Manage by stages,
• Manage by exception,
• Focus on products,
• Tailor to suit the project environment.

The second instalment of our 2015 Agile predictions comes from Simon Powers, Agile / Architecture - Transformation Coach. Simon's predictions include the growth of Agile consultancy in 2015, and even greater infiltration of Lean practices.

The infamous ‘selfie’ that Ellen DeGeneres took at the Oscars has, at the time of writing, been re-tweeted over 3 million times.

So, always up for a challenge, I thought I would take my own ‘shelfie’ and see if I can get it to go viral! What do you think?

I was talking to a few friends some weeks ago about what “transforming IT to transform your business” was all about, as I have traditionally spent most of my time in Biotech / Healthcare / Pharmaceutical businesses. They then asked about change and we talked about Agile, Scrum, Atern, Kanban, Leans oftware and then moved the conversation into what change was really all about, I aligned it to making a Soufflé. One of them said I really understand that now, that would make a great blog…..so here it is….radtac, the best soufflé cooks in the business .

The challenges of making a Souffle are analogous to making transformation happen.