Personal Kanban Wins the Shingo Prize
Personal Kanban won a Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence this year. This is the highest honor in Lean and we share the award with some pretty august company. This award is humbling. Shingo awards are usually focused on manufacturing or applications of specific Lean principles with many direct nods to Toyota. Personal Kanban is strongly rooted in Lean ideals, but it much more focused (as the name implies) on the individual – on us as people. Tonianne and I are greatly energized by this...
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Beyond Agile: Tales of Continuous Improvement Published
After two years of hard work by Maritza van den Heuvel and Joanne Ho, we are excited to announce the Kindle publication of Beyond Agile: Tales of Continuous Improvement. Beyond Agile is: Case Studies in Lean/Agile teams involved in continuous improvement Examinations in the use of visual controls like kanban for knowledge workers Truthful and sometimes painful stories of teams and organizations working for better process Presented through 10 case studies spread over four continents, Beyond...
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The Client Management A3: Modus Cooperandi White Paper #2
Lean thinkers seek systemic causes to workplace or project issues. The goal is to find procedural or functional root causes to unpopular behaviors or outcomes. Psychologists warn us of Fundamental Attribution Error, a common human bias that leads us to blame before we analyze. Lean uses the A3 as a tool to examine problems, hypothesize solutions, and then run experiments to test those hypotheses. But sometimes, people might actually be the system we want to fix. In software development, there...
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In Progress v In Process
After a recent webinar with SwiftKanban, I received an email from a manager in Sweden with several teams that had workflows difficult to tame. He said: I help teams getting started with Kanban and have some teams that are very similar to the architect example you showed in the webinar. These teams typically struggle with having many tasks and tasks that take a long time. Hence as you mentioned in the talk a “normal” WIP limit is not all that useful. We have tried various...
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How We Do Business: Sample After Action Report
When we work with a team for a week, we learn a surprising amount about how the team works, the company’s relationships, the products, and the needs of the organizations. Anyone that’s worked with Modus knows our After Action Reports (AARs) can become quite detailed. Some have been over 50 pages. We thought it might be helpful to show people what a sample AAR might look like. While each AAR is very specific to the needs of the particular client, this one gives a good idea of the range of...
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