Tired of the same old boring and ineffective daily meetings with your team? Try this new Awesome Team Focus daily routine! It will help your team use a swarming technique to laser-focus on the stuff that really matters and get it done. As a bonus it will help you start limiting Work In Process without

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

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

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

The Kanban and Scrum minibook is now available with Polish translation. Great thanks to Zbigniew Zemla for the translation! Pobierz tutaj (aka  polish for “get it here” ): http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook Cheers Mattias

  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

For  this year’s Stop Starting conference, we asked ourselves three questions: How do you develop awesome products? How do you bootstrap a successful mega project using Agile contracts? How do you use Agile and Lean thinking to turn a stagnant company around? We then picked the brains of people from real companies who have been

Update: The book has since the publication of this blog been
made available for purchase at LeanPub.

A couple of weeks ago I published my new book ”Toolbox for the Agile Coach – Visualization Examples (How great teams visualize their work)” even though it’s still very much a work in progress.

I’ve made it public, thanks to persuasion from my colleague Hans Brattberg. I decided to try out Google Slides to make it easily accessible and to provide a simple way to give feedback. That turned out to be a great decision. The response has been overwhelming. There are at any given point 5-15 people reading the book, many of which provide great feedback, point out spelling correction and provides generous suggestion for more examples.

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It’s always nice to look at real data and these two studies are worth their read.

• “Impact of Agile” from Rally compares the effect of WIP and estimation techniques on productivity and quality.
• “The State of Developer Productivity” by Rebel labs examines the effect of XP style techniques on quality and predictability.

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One of my biggest surprises when I first met the squads I where going to work with at Spotify was that none of them were using User Stories. At first I observed to see their alternative. Unfortunately there was none. Instead most of the work got done as big chunks of work (what I would tend to call Epics) that was sliced into a todo-list of tasks (named that way by the developers) and also divided according different platforms.

Squad focus on technical tasks

A typical board contained one or more business cases and lanes for each developer/platform with tasks that were executed upon. These big “busses” where on the board blocking other works for weeks, which of course meant there needed to exist one or more emergency lanes for all expedite work (in the long run, most work).

This is a setup that does not foster collaboration, focus on value and art-of-the-possible. From an agile fluence point of view I would say it is a way of working that does not even reach fluence level 1 (Christian and I will describe agile fluence in more depth in a follow up blog post). From my experience focusing on User Stories is a great way of fostering the above values, and reach fluence level 1.

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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

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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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”

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

På ett bräde blev boken Riv pyramiderna igen dubbelt så tjock (222 sidor) med det nya kapitlet “En organisation utan huvud – en agil odyssé“. I den gör vi en historisk, praktiskt och teoretisk resa från apache-indianerna, över Ford, Toyota, Lean, Scrum, Agile, flödeseffektivitet, Hegel, Kant, hur det påverkade oss och mycket mer. Slutstation:en massiv

Technical Debt is usually referred to as something Bad. One of my other articles The Solution to Technical Debt certainly implies that, and most other articles and books on the topic are all about how to get rid of technical debt.

But is debt always bad? When can debt be good? How can we use technical debt as tool, and distinguish between Good and Bad debt?

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This is MIKE, The Daily Meeting Microphone. MIKE is a concept. An idea.  Captured on a poster. If you like it; Click the image below (or click here to download the powerpoint). Print it on A3 format. Put it on the wall next to your team wall or in the office corridor. Done 🙂 If

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

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

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