This is a guest post by Robert Dempsey, CEO & Founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions. He helps clients with agile training and builds products like scrum’d. I wish I had known about Kanban when I was a network administrator. It would have helped me immensely in terms of prioritization of work and making everything we [...]
Kanban – Scheduling system for telling us what, when & how much to produce
Devised in the late 1940′s by Toyota for operating their shop floor production line, Kanban helps lean IT stay focused. Typically implemented on a physical board prominently displayed in the company, this method of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) also betters production lines through rigorous application of continuous improvement.
One finding from our survey was that a lot of you want to read more about agile basics. As most of you haven’t followed Agile Web Operations since Day One, here’s a list of the top three posts about agile and kanban:
If you want to get things done, focus is the key. Single piece flow (focusing on only one task at a time) might be too extreme, but limiting your work to your capacity is mandatory. No matter whether we’re talking about a team, an organization or about your personal productivity.
Matthias and I started this blog over a year ago because we had first-hand experiences with the rift between developers and sysadmins. We knew this was a lose-lose situation not only for those directly involved, but the companies they were working for as well. We’ve described many real-life examples of how to overcome this rift, [...]
Agile methodology builds on the concept of iterations – time boxes – in which you create a piece of working software. Each iteration starts with a planning meeting where the team takes stories from the backlog and commits to the sprint goal. If you use a tool like Pivotal Tracker, you even get emergent iterations [...]
Currently, I’m preparing for teaching my next course on Agile Methodology. Again and again, I wonder what is the single most important thing my students should be able to take with them after four full days. One of my core messages is definitely that agile is more about principles than about practices. If you absorb [...]
We’re using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It’s great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We’re really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we [...]
It’s been a while since we were using Thoughtworks Mingle as our agile project management tool. We liked their Kanban style Card Walls View a lot. Nevertheless, we switched to PivotalTracker because of its superior support of prioritizing stories in a backlog and automated iteration planning. Unfortunately, PivotalTracker does not offer any Kanban style card [...]
Zen is a brand new Kanban tool for lean project management. In contrast to PivotalTracker, which concentrates on automating iteration management for SCRUM like projects, Zen’s main view is a story board. The funny thing is, that I preferred the stroy board view in Mingle over the list view provided by PivotalTracker before I started [...]
