By Dominica DeGrandis
Everyone (myself included) seems to be having a crazy busy week. 2012 appears to be evolving rapidly. Let’s remember to find the solitude necessary for creativity and balance. Speaking of balance…
News
Balancing near term and long term efforts can sometimes turn into heated debates when prioritizing tasks. In this post, Jabe Bloom discusses “big scary company killing problems that are obvious to some, but unseen by others”. http://www.calmbetawave.com/2012/01/death-rests-within.html
Seattle Lean Coffee was a hit this week with 15 people in attendance. The favorite topics converged on handling “Command and Control” leaders and consultants “Inflicting help“. I’m hoping we’ll see a recap of the session soon. http://seattle.leancoffee.org/
A Bill Fox interview with David Anderson relays that Kanban is not a method. Instead, it is a way to propel an organization toward change - change which is contextual and unique for each organization. http://www.foxhighperspective.com/blog/?page_id=367
The number of #kanban tweets continues to grow with the expansion of kanban use in areas outside of software development. From the classroom to Portfolio Mgmt, we look at some examples this week.
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According to HashTracking.com, Twitter hashtag “#kanban” generated 70,130 impressions, reaching an audience of 52,009 followers from 97 tweets within the past 24 hours (Jan.25, 2012). Also displayed are the top ten peeps by number of tweets, followers and impressions. Makes for interesting data points.
Jim Collins new book, Great by Choice, is a study on winning behavior when confronted by uncertainty. Collins compares companies that win with companies that languish. It’s a terrific read from a Kanban practitioner’s perspective due to the uncanny parallels between the behavior of winners and key Kanban concepts for coping with risk. I was so intrigued; I wrote a blog post on it. http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/how_do_teams_continue_to_win_during_times_of_turmoil_and_uncertainty/
There’s been a lot of talk lately on Kanban for Portfolio Mgmt. Here’s a post on Kanban for Customer Portfolio Mgmt showing the board layout with Swift Kanban. Intangible tasks are on a separate board which in some ways sounds appealing, but I’m wondering how they visualize priority between business tasks and intangible tasks. http://www.valueinnova.com/?q=content/kanban-customer-portfolio-management
By Dominica DeGrandis
It is fun to discover articles sprinkled with Kanban properties, even though they don’t specifically mention Kanban. I stumbled across several good ones this week.
Having worked for their competitor for many years, I find this list of principles from Getty Images very interesting. They flow, they pull, they stop the line, they optimize the whole, etc… It sounds too good to be true. http://blog.gettyimages.com/2012/01/17/from-our-lean-and-agile-dev-team/
Disclosure - this article isn’t really about Kanban, but “What’s in Store for 2012: A Few Predictions” offers all around good insights for us. In particular, the value of software will continue to decline as open source contributions continues to rise and bring an overload of choices – perhaps too many. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/01/13/2012-predictions/
The New Year has people experimenting with new ideas and challenging popular arguments.
This week, we check out ideas and arguments across four different countries.
“The Project Portfolio Kanban Story: A Basic Approach”, by Pawel Brodzinski (@pawelbrodzinski).
This post captures a portfolio experiment. I like how the last column is titled “Maintenance” instead of “Done” – a friendly reminder that projects once deployed will need to be maintained. http://blog.brodzinski.com/2011/12/project-portfolio-kanban-basic-approach.html
Our last Roundup of 2011 includes two stories from the trenches – one on evolving standups and the
other on scheduling deployments. Also included is a concise list of events and resources to end the year.
Peaceful holidays everyone!
News
Sami Honkonen (senior consultant at Reaktor), captures a story of evolving standups in a recent post, “Kanban Daily Revisited”.
Worth noting - they formalize notifications by including them in their standup agenda. http://www.samihonkonen.fi/2011/11/kanban-daily-revisited/
