lean

One Piece Flow – Alternate of Kanban in Software Development

Kanban process is based on 6 basic practices

Visualise
Limit work in progress.
Manage flow.
Make policies explicit.
Implement feedback loops.
Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally.

If you reflect on these principles the premise essentially is to optimize the flow. Limiting WIP is a way to do that. There are no right or wrong numbers around what exactly should be the WIP limit of each column. All these numbers are bound to change dynamically and organically until the flow has been optimized.

Kanban Mythbusters: When to Use Scrum and When to Use Kanban?

by ShriKant Vashishtha 1 Comment

Kanban comes with the least prescriptions but then you find lots of fake implementations in practice.

Lots of times, people move to Kanban from Scrum just for the convenience.

It’s far easier to live with a process model with no time constraint, no pressure to improve continuously. Also some people get away with a Kanban board with no WIP limits. Even if they put WIP limits in place, you see no discipline in maintaining WIP limits or changing them when required.

Scrum is a Shu or Ha (Shu-Ha-Ri) kind of framework which can be immediately used by beginners. It has valid prescriptions to start with. It’s evident that the process model with the least prescriptions (Kanban) requires more discipline and should be in Ha or Ri category.

When to Use Scrum?

Scrum is useful when a cross-functional team works together within a timebox (sprint) towards a sprint goal. It doesn’t work when you don’t know on what item you’ll be working next and sprint can’t be planned.

Lean Product Development: Dealing with Business Emergency

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

We all know biggest risk in the product development is building a WRONG product. There are numerous examples from history to see why some products did not see light of the day or big success.

Recently, I came across a product team which took MVP approach and built a product which saw very good initial success. But with time product was unable to keep the users engaged and convert initial success to revenue to keep it floating.

Some of the questions the team started to deliberate were:

Is this a good product idea but a targeting wrong market segment….? OR
We are in right user segment but not a right product/idea – the one which does not solve user problems completely.

Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?

by ShriKant Vashishtha Leave a Comment

Implementing Agile in a big enterprise is not an easy task. The metaphor I sometimes use for big enterprise is to compare it with Elephant. It’s very easy for a small living being to move and maneuver. However when it comes to elephant, it requires time to build momentum and when it actually moves, it moves slowly.

People involved in Agile transformation get frustrated because of all perceived delays. Frustration is understandable but not sure if much can be done other than understanding the simple reality that you are dealing with an elephant and not a tiger or mouse.
[Read more…] about Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?

Webinar: How to Deal with Emergencies in a Lean/Scrum Team

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Every Agile team has to deal with different emergencies next to their regular work. Every team dream of achieving sustainable pace comes with nightmares of production emergencies/defects, support and maintenance tasks within a sprint which takes focus completely off the sprint goals. The goal of this webinar is to see different approaches team can take to absorb a reasonable amount of uncertainty, striking balance between robustness and speed within the sprint.

Also we will discuss about how to deal with “Pivot” in lean product development. In this state, product has to go through a course correction in terms of vision, market segment and features. This is almost an emergency on business side. In webinar, we will see how engineering teams need to do course correction in their approach too.

Audience will learn:

How to plan for production emergencies during a sprint
How to apply strategic and tactical thinking to handle changes
How engineering team needs to deal with development when product is in Pivot

If this sounds interesting to you, please register for the webinar here. Do share with others too!

Webinar Timings: Wed, May 13, 2015 9:30 PM – 10:30 PM IST