All kanban systems experience some “heart attacks” once in a while.    As a team, you can react in two ways: abandon your kanban system, or act smart. If you manage the situation well, you can learn from this experience and improve your kanban system to propel you all the way to high-performance.   Building

Yep! The collection of Kanban boards now is now available in french. Big thanks to Nicolas Mereaux who made it happen! Here’s the link to “10 tableaux kanban et leur contexte” (fr). (the english 1.5v is available here )      

November in Sweden: Blä! The sky is impossibly low and grey, it’s pitch dark at 4 pm, freezing, and then everyone gets cold. Especially men: they get man-cold. There are also situations when your Kanban gets a man-cold (though it doesn’t need to be November for that): it’s not really dying, but it feels like

Just got back from Athens and Devops Greece where I talked about “Using Kanban in the field, and how we got management buy in to do so” Two key takaways are: Shift leadership behaviours, in order to shift your culture. The good news is: You can all exericise them, they are not personality traits. The invisible

In Sweden, we love to ‘fika’. Fika requires you to take time to sit down and sip coffee (usually strong and black) with your colleagues to chitchat about this and that. Visiting different organizations, I tend to fika a lot and hear all these stories about how things are going. Today, I’ll like to share

I have the pleasure to be invited back to I’ve hosted a workshop about “how to train to Kanban” at the Lean Kanban France 2017.  The session was specially designed for you who is about to start training one or several teams, or who want to become better at training Kanban. It builds on the “Kanban

Are you thinking to start using Kanban but are unsure how and where to start? Here are 10 tips to help you get going on your Kanban journey!   1. Start with a small “Team” An easy way to gain experience with Kanban is to introduce it to a team that already delivers a well-understood

Here are the slides I’ve been using to present “From Good-enough to Great” at the Lean Kanban France 2016 conference (LKFR16). In this presentation, I speak about some the patterns I have observed when coaching many Kanban team. Especially regarding how teams mature and how to help team better succeed. I introduce for the first

I will – finally – be speaking at Lean Kanban France 2016 this year. Being French, it should perhaps falls naturally to present at a French conference. Life as had other plans for me so far, but this year the stars are in the right position and it is happening. Though, I have to confess

During extraordinary situations and crises, some people stand out and shine. One of these was Lottie Knutson. Lottie led the Crisis team at Fritidsresor during the Tsunami disaster in 2004. While governments were struggling to figure out what had happened, Lottie’s team was already hitting the ground running. Lottie will be speaking at Fast Feedback

Hi! I’ve updated the  Kanban boards  collection with examples from departements outside IT, Product portfolio and Corporate Legal. Download “10 kanban boards and their context” as pdf

Wow, just Wow!I am very honored to have won the Brickell Key Award 2016! Actually, very glad, surprised and humbled. The competition was impressive, if possible even more so than two years ago when I was first nominated. I want to thanks the Kanban community, David Anderson for his inspiration, Sandvik IT for their trust and

Here comes the slides from the Workshop I’ve held at the Lean Kanban North America 2016 conference in San Diego: From Good-Enough to Great from Christophe Achouiantz What the Workshop is about From good-enough to greatYou’ve had some success with you Kanban System: you’ve managed flow and quickly increased your capability. But now the energy

I recently recorded a webinar where I walk through 5 ways to find slack (to invest in critical improvements),  when a team is under high pressure. Enjoy! http://leankit.com/blog/2015/11/real-world-kanban/  

InfoQ has just released an interview regarding my latest book Real World Kanban. In this we walk through the reasons behind writing the book plus why Kanban needs to be matched by long term thinking to improve over time  (aka behaviours like “don’t pass bad quality forward” matters) Check it out:  http://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-real-world-kanban ps: For anyone interested in the book, I have

  Just back from Lean Kanban France where I gave a presentation on “Learnings across Kanban case studies, and what happened next” and introduced Skarin’s law: ”The number of improvement initiatives in a kanban system is proportional to the trust members have in that systems purpose” (.. it’s never too late to introduce your own law 🙂

Are you thinking about electronic Kanban tools? Do you need transparency to end-to-end flow? Do you work across multiple sites? Tired of managing work states in Jira? Here’s a short video demonstrating visualisation, analytics and key features in Swift-Kanban & Leankit. Both combine “simple and flexible” with “enterprise ready”. I also mention an interesting runner up – Obeya. Some things I

My new Kanban case book now ships from Amazon (as hardcover or in Kindle format). Learn how we: Improved the full value chain by using Enterprise Kanban. (Find out how we improved time to market and shifted focus from Sprints to Flow to deliver customer value in a traditional company.) Boosted engagement, teamwork, and flow in

My new book – “Real World Kanban” is now available. Here’s the plot in a nutshell: What happens when Kanban is used in real projects? Kanban has few rules, but an infinite number of strategies. What seems easy in theory can become tangled in practice. So there’s nothing like learning from real world cases. Learn how

A decade of agile boils down to theses simple fundamentals and steps for me. A. Ask: do you need to improve as an organization? Only go forward if your sincere answer is yes. Ask everyone: Do you want to improve? Same procedure. Make sure you will fail (and win) regularly by commitment (plan/hypotheses) and checkpoints.

Had a great day at Stop Starting Start Finishing – Lean Kanban Nordic. It is cool to see how far companies have come in applying Lean in software, especially experimenting with how to tie together the full value chain. Saku Tuominen really challenged us to think make innovation actionable and not put it into a

Lotta Olsson and I will present Sandvik IT’s Kanban journey at the Lean Kanban Nordic 2014 conference in Stockholm (a.k.a. “Stop Starting, Start Finishing” conference). Lotta is currently managing the Operational Excellence Support (OpX) unit within Sandvik IT. The OpX is the ‘home’ of Kanban, ITIL and other processes and tools designed to improve the

A fundamental component for fluid operations is an organization’s ability to solve problems and make decisions. Any change or transformation cannot move faster than it’s ability to make decisions and communicate these. This is key if we realize that living with changes is the future status quo of operations.

Many years ago when I was still at University I got to meat a leader at production facility at Volvo, he asked us,

“How long time does it take from when the management team has made a decision and a worker on the shop floor grasps what this means?”

“Three years”.

Without a doubt, this is way to slow for product development and software. But it puts a finger on the starting point for a normal, traditional company, before any lean or agile transformation begins. So, in order to succeed with a transformation that will challenge existing (often plan based structures) we need a better decision & communication process.

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This years Lean Kanban Nordic conference will be something extra. The focus in on improving the full value chain, from concept to cash. You will get an unique opportunities to listen and discuss with practitioners sharing their experience of how they have improved their companies using Lean thinking. For example, learn:

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The Gist

• ToDo has a flow. It knows about cycle times and about being DONE. Trello does not.
• ToDo has Planning Poker Estimates. Trello does not have any estimates.
• ToDo has automatic burn up charts. Trello does not.
• ToDo has swim lanes which groups cards by your dimensions. Trello does not.
• ToDo has Work-In-Progress limits. Trello does not.
• ToDo has upgrade possibilities to the full tool set of Projectplace. Trello has a bunch of plugins from different vendors of various quality.

Already convinced? Sign up for ToDo by Projectplace! Want to know more? Read on.

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Here comes the second article in the Kanban at Sandvik IT series on InfoQ. Based on the experience from Sandvik IT, I try to answer the question “How to engineer kanban systems to be sustainable and resilient despite the constant level of changes in today’s Enterprise?“. This article is somewhat more complex and deeper than

I have just got the amazing news that I am one of the 6 nominees for this year’s Brickell Key Award! I am really humbled by the fact that you guys out there voted for me. The Brickell Key Award has been awarded to people that I look up to in the Kanban community like,

Kanban is easy to set up,  maintaining and improving is harder! When I visit a kanban team, I use these questions to check they know what they are doing. They are helpful since they are not tool focused, rather verifies that there is a  tactic being used. After each question I add “please show it

I have collected and distilled  some of the basic patterns of Kanban-board patterns I’ve found on various boards. You can combine them in any way that suites you, but you probably don’t need all of them at the same time. Here’s how a sample pattern looks like: If you print the pdf to 9 pages per A3