I have finally found the time to write the story of Sandvik IT’s journey into Kanban-land. The articles is now available on InfoQ: Part I – How we got started Part II – What we learned This story has been told several times, with Johan Nordin (check our LKCE11 talk) or alone (check my  LKCE13

Here comes version 1.1 of “The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide”.The changes in this version are mostly corrections and clarifications. They reflect the way the Kick-start concept is currently evolving (for the better, of course) within Sandvik IT.Here are some noteworthy changes: The single biggest change is the renaming of the “Team Lead” into the “Flow Manager”

Here are the slides from my Session at Lean Kanban Central Europe 2013 (LKCE13).   The most unexpected question I got was from an elderly gentleman that said that he misunderstood the title of my talk, as he thought it had to do with lessons that I had learned working with people over 50 years

Återigen har ni diskussionen om “working software over comprehensive documentation” verkligen betyder att man inte behöver dokumentera någonting alls. Eller diskussionen om det är ok att förlänga sprinten med några dagar för att hinna klart den sista fixen på den där storyn. Eller diskussionen om vad det egentligen innebär att vara “lean”. Känner du igen dig? Kan det vara så att alla har nytta av att ha samma grundförståelse av centrala begrepp i och runt “agile”? Läs vidare för ett enkelt sätt att skaffa den kunskapen!Continue reading

What happens when we apply kanban across the full value chain?  What if you are a traditional company, how far can you improve before organizational structures becomes your key constraint? Can you make great products in a multi team scenario without product owners and project managers? Let me share with you our learning of applying

I just got interviewed by Joseph Dager at Business901 before the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference in Hamburg. You’ll find the podcast here (includes downloadable as mp3 and available through Itunes) See you in Hamburg!

I tend to focus a lot on Kanban and Teams. The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide has 1098 occurrences of the term team, and I even write about Kanban teams. But, as David Anderson reminded me recently on Twitter, there is no concept of team in Kanban, and as such there are no “Kanban teams”! So why

Johan Nordin and I plan to attend the Lean Kanban Central Europe (LKCE) conference this year again. Due to a busy fall it will unfortunatly be our only chance to meet everyone from the community. Here is the abstract of the paper that we have submited to LKCE13, entitled “Lessons learned from coaching 50+ kanban

Just got back from DARE conference in Belgium.  I don’t know how Maarten makes it happen, but I always leave with more ideas than I had when I came. I ran a session on visualization – highlighting our brains limited capacity capture and record knowledge (and what to think of when using visualization). An amazingly

Added a visualization combining architecture with progress follow up for more complex product development scenarios. You’ll find the complete collection of boards here! Cheers Mattias

Few coaches and many teams. How does that work? In the Kanban Kick-start Field Guide you mention that you have kick-started more than 50 teams. How do you keep track of the teams and their status? For our Kanban-coach team, each team really is a work item and, unsurprisingly, we try to see and understand

The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide is now available! What is it?The Kanban Kick-start Field Guide is a practical guide to help you kick-start your team into using the Kanban method. It gathers the experience from introducing Kanban to 50+ teams at Sandvik IT. Who wrote it?The Field Guide was written by two lean/agile coaches, Christophe

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

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

Kanban and Scrum book is now available in Swedish translation, you can download from InfoQ here Thanks to Johan Natt och Dag!

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

What will software development be like in the future? “Agile” as we know it, will not be around, nor will test-driven development, continuous delivery, or BDD-like methodologies. I’ve been pondering this for a while, and based on some observations and a dose of wishful thinking, I’ve arrived at the conclusion above. Do you agree?

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Aaaaaah…  Nice. *Dumdi dum di dum*   .. what? Ah! I can walk around and pull from the other side!  *clever* 🙂   Darn! Not always easy being a kanban coach 🙂

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

Hi! Just back from a great conference – LKCE 2012 –  and a great town – Vienna. A really cool thing was the illustrator who worked around the clock to visualize how he interpreted the difference presentations. He did a great job (see below). What would you do – learning from charts I challenge the

Here are the slides for my keynote “Lean from the Trenches” at Agile Eastern Europe, Kiev. And here is the book/ebook, in case you want more details. Thanks for attending!

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

I was invited by Agilenetið to come to Iceland and do a talk. That didn’t fit my travel schedule, so we instead decided to do an experimental “remote seminar”. That is, with me on a video link instead of physically in Iceland. I’ve done webinars before, and usually miss the interactivity. I wanted it to “feel” like I was there, discussing and interacting with the participants.

Here’s what we learned:

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Here are annotated slides from my lighting talk Agile@Home at Agila Sverige 2012. Have you tried a BBQ board? Or a travel spike? Or a homework burnup chart? How about Limiting WIP in the kitchen, or the closet? How about agile party planning? There are plenty of ways that Agile and Lean practices and ideas

Last month market the launch of the Kanban Accreditation scheme.  Let’s give our view including why we have chosen to engage ourselves as members of the advisory board.

Why the Kanban accreditation scheme?
Kanban is a word that needs meaning. So what meaning do we want people to connect with the word? This matters (to us..) . Stumbling upon about kanban classes declaring it will help you “resource optimize”  it makes me think there is a need. (To any unfamiliar reader.. kanban helps you improve flow, quite a different thing..)

Any accredited class will contain some core messages that we care to share. The best way we could think of to make sure that messages is good was to engage ourselves in the process 🙂

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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