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January 27, 2012 – 1:13 am by Yassal Sundman
Great retrospectives are amazing, they have a way of really getting a team to work together and to energize them ahead of a new challenge. But even a great retrospective becomes boring and routine after a while. Luckily, there are a lot of us at Crisp working with different teams, so we got together this evening for a peer to peer exchange about retrospectives. We each got to pitch retrospective exercises and games that we’d like to try, or that we wanted to share. We ended up discussing and trying out 9 of them. Here’s a summary in case you’d like to try some of them out at your next retrospective!
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Posted on
January 26, 2012 – 10:14 pm by Anders Laestadius
Continuous improvement is a central part of both agile and lean; it’s the way to increase the productivity and ensure that the organization delivers an ever increasing level of value to the customers and the organization. Lean is derived from Toyota and the Toyota Way, which has inspired a lot of companies in the western world in their quest to increase their productivity as well. But we often focuse on the techniques and practices and do not see the more fundamental parts of the Toyota system that enable their very high level of improvement each year.
I worked at a company that tried to implement the Toyota Way and reach the same level of continuous improvment with what I believe to be the wrong focus. My company estblished a goal to reach seven improvements per employee in average per year. A goal that was inspired from a report that stated that Toyota implemented 1,000,000 improvements per year, which of course, is very high. This is one of many aspects that show why Toyota has managed to grow they way they have done during the last 50 years.
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January 22, 2012 – 5:17 am by Henrik Kniberg
I’ve published another book! This one’s called “Lean from the Trenches“. It is about how we scaled a 60-person project by combing techniques from Kanban, Scrum, and XP. I chose this title because it really it illustrates how to put Lean principles into practice in a software project, especially the notion of an end-to-end Kanban system, divided into tiers to coordinate multiple teams.
We learned a lot during this project and I’m really happy that I found the time to write about it. The book follows the same style as “Scrum and XP from the Trenches“, with 100% focus on real-life experience rather than theory. Lots of pictures and examples as usual.
You can get a hold of the book here, and also participate in a discussion forum.
http://pragprog.com/book/hklean/lean-from-the-trenches
Any feedback is welcome.
If you’ve read the book and feel like adding a review on amazon then that is greatly appreciated 
Posted on
January 21, 2012 – 9:47 pm by Henrik Kniberg
Hi Brazil!
I’m happy to say that I’ll be visiting you in a few weeks.
I’ll be involved in two public events together with Samuel Crescêncio:
The course will be in English, but Samuel will be around to help translate when necessary.
This is a unique opportunity, since I don’t get around to Brazil very often. In fact, this is my first visit ever to South America (I’m on a
Big Family Trip).
You’ll like this course. My courses are almost always rated 9.2 – 9.8 on average (out of 10) by course participants. In addition to the Scrum stuff I’ll be talking about Lean and Kanban and going through some real-life examples from my latest book
Lean from the Trenches. The course is highly interactive, with plenty of hands-on exercises and discussions. The course is also very pragmatic, focusing on what actually works and doesn’t work in real life. No dogma.
Posted on
January 17, 2012 – 3:51 pm by Mattias Skarin
Hi!
Tim Yevgrashyn has made an amazing job translating my 10 kanban board article (included poorly crafted English into Russian. Thanks!
It is available here!
I did study Russian once, but it’s a far cry now from where I left it.
- Proud over: Once fooling a guard at the Kremlin tickett stand that I was Russian
- Less proud over: Not able to grasp the price of an apple I bought at the local market
Since my Russian leaves much to wish for.. comments in English please 
Cheers – Mattias
