Christophe Achouiantz

Improving continuously requires to be truly aware of one’s current condition. A lot comes “for free” when using Kanban (visualization policies, feedback policies and the measure of flow). The Kanban board gives a “snapshot” of the current situation, but a time aspect is needed to better understand trends and evolution. That is where the charts

I just love Kickstarter.com! For me it has become the best place to discover new stuff on the web. The creativity gathered there is simply staggering! Kickstarter succeeds in raising and focusing creativity by offering a mechanism to finance projects that is not based on risk-aversion and profit-focus, but on anyone’s dream to create something that they

Here is a teaser for “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide“.The document is almost ready by now, with some minor work left on the boosts in the “After the Kick-start” chapter. And, yes, there is a section about Depth of Kanban in there. The Cover of the book (it may change) Key Aspects Due to our

  I really got inspired reading Håkan Fors’ article on “Are the Kanban practices in the right order”. Not only did he linked to a presentation Johan Nordin and I did at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 (which is always good), he also presented a way to visualize the maturity – or depth – of a

With fellow colleague Johan Nordin, I have been working on capturing the “process” (actually “way-of-working” sounds better) that we have been using to introduce Kanban to 50+ teams for the past 2 years at Sandvik IT. The result is “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide“.What can I do with the Kanban kick-start field guide? This field

Kanban and Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata are really made for each others. Håkan Forss has already written a lot about that; even made it exciting using Lego. So, I just want to re-inforce this by adding my point of view and an illustration. For a team to evolve towards a specific vision of excellence, it must start working towards

I have been working as a consultant for about 6 years by now and under that time there is one thing that has had me really frustrated: how do I make it stick? Success It usually worked like this: I introduce some measure of Agile to setup a project to succeed or to make an

I have finally found the time to create a webbinar from the talk I did for “Från Krav till System 2012” conference about User Story Mapping. I attended the conference in October but managed to catch the flu for the January re-run and had to cancel. So here it is on Vimeo for those who

Yuval Yeret (@yuvalyeret), Lean/Agile Coach extraordinaire, compiled a very practical list of avanced Kanban reading/watching materials. Reading the list I get a view of Kanban centered around continuous improvement towards a True North (as described by Toyota Kata’s Mike Rother). This is has also become my understanding of Kanban, especially when trying to motivate and

Nu finns OH-bilderna tillgängliga för min presentation om User Story Mapping på NFI’s “Krav till System 2012” konferens på Slide Share.Konferensen den 9 oktober är fullbokad (200 personer) men en ny omgång planeras in januari på grund av att så många ville deltag. Håll koll på NFIs webbsida för mer info.Inom kort tänker jag skriva

I would like to share a picture that I have beeing using a lot when helping a team setup a Kanban system. I just love good pictures. They are so direct and can help you grasp a whole context and how to act on it. Actually, a dream improvement of the A3 thinking would be

My current customer went through a re-organization of the whole IT department in search for a faster, more value-centered IT. The ambition looks great on paper and the future will tell if it helped. Anyway, a lot of teams were disolved and new teams were formed in the wake of the change. These new teams

As you may have noticed, I am quite into User Story Mapping right now. I find it an excellent way to establish a constructive dialog between the customer(s) and the team, as well as between the different specialists within the team. Such a dialog is the best insurance to get the “right” product/service that will

I was quite impressed by last year’s Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 (LKCE11) conference. The speakers were great and the organization of the conference was outstanding. So, I decided to try to repeat my feat from last year by getting invited as a speaker. Just to make it bit more challenging, this year my contribution

I made a presentation to introduce agile and lean to some colleagues and customers during Sogeti Inspiration’s Day in Borlänge. I wanted the attendants to get something concrete with them from my talk, something they could apply directly whitout any certified process, method or tool. Something that would start their journey towards delighting their customers.

Yuval Yeret from Agile Sparks really liked a picture I made for the Sandvik’s case study “Igniting Change in 20 teams within 6 months”. The picture demonstrates the power of visualization and is the results of discussions with Johan Nordin from Sandvik. When he showed it to his colleagues they really got inspired and decided

I have the great pleasure to have had my session-proposal accepted to the Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 conference! Together with Johan Nordin, a colleague coach from Sandvik IT Services, we will present the result of our Kanban coaching since november 2011. The title of our session is about scaling Kanban. The actual presentation is

I have had the pleasure to hold a lightning talk for the Agila Sverige conference in Stockholm about “Scaling Scrum in the Enterprise with Kanban”.The talk went well but the format (10 minutes) made it more like an elevator pitch. You can find an enhanced – somewhat longer – version of the slides used during

A customer once described the effect I was having on the organization as a “vitamin bomb”. It is a pretty cool comment to get in term of performance appraisal, though it was not quite what I was expecting (“more efficient” or “pleased customers” would have been sufficient). What was I doing as an agile coach

Working at different clients, I often see the need to have many Scrum teams working together towards a common goal – be it a large project or initiative.The issue with having many Scrum teams quickly becomes a question of how do you keep the coherence – the actual control over the project. So many issues,

How would you present Scrum (agile) and Kanban (lean) as building from a common principle? What is the common core of these methods? These questions were the topic of recent discussions with colleagues agile coaches Joakim Sundén and Marcus Hammarberg. Based on our reflections, I would like to propose – yet another – definition of

Last September I attended the UK Lean Conference in London (September 27-29) with colleague coach Joakim Sundén. That was an exciting conference. Not the least because it was the first time for me that I met in person the Lean and Kanban thought leaders that you can follow on the leanagile and kanbandev mail lists