This post based on my reading of Henrik Kniberg’s book Lean from the Trenches. I am not going to write a detailed review on the book but rather I provide my own interpretations.
Maturity in using the tool
Either Scrum, Kanban or XP we should avoid getting obsessed by any one. Instead use them according to the situation. They can be helpful in providing guidelines but they can be tweaked wisely to the environment. Our approach for managing development or project should be composite rather biased to specific method or technique. Read more…
Once you visualize the work, you can improve it! I have heard this in many occasions and from prominent experts. When you visualize the work, you actually arrive at shared visible understanding which allow actions to be logical consequence. Actions are stemmed from understanding the principles of flow, bottlenecks and the five focusing principles.
Resistance means the effect of change has started. It resembles our body resistance to the medicines which indicates our bodies are actual responding. Read more…
For large projects, the size can be 50+ people working for 1.5 to 3 years, which is more than 100,000 man-hours/year. If the project is about to sink, new skills will be required which are not available in the project team.
It can be surprising how such entity which can have wealth of skills and resources are not capable to save the project. In fact the ship captain and crews will step aside (either voluntarily or forced) and leave the helm for rescue consultants till the ship becomes ready for normal operation. Read more…
Five years ago I prepared report for a Lean transformation for a certain client department. The PCE was less than 1%! PCE is defined as the ratio between the time we actually spent working on a feature to the Lead Time. PCE is an average metric.
The purpose of this blog is to explore if there were only one metric to choose, should it be the PCE and why. Read more…
PoC is a widely used metric in traditional organizations to monitor their projects. Normally such projects can have 40+ people with multiple vendors involved. The project is structured into teams some implement Agile others are not. Sometimes the program management wants to become Agile but they are not sure how to structure their team for meeting compliance and regulation expectations, as well as inherited organization’s practices. Read more…
Process improvement has been doomed to be a waste function by many organizations. From my background, many who work in process improvement are treated as compliance workers instead of being contributors to the bottom-line. For me process improvement is the business. Every day we take decisions to get certain benefits. Read more…
This post is my own reflection after reading Harvard Business Review article of Nov. 2011 here. This article focuses on six perspectives or convoluted means which great organizations must have in-order to succeed in today’s globalized economy, which are:
1. Common purpose
2. Long-term focus
3. Emotional engagement
4. Partnering with the public
5. Innovation
6. Self-organization Read more…
User stories creation is a useful mechanism for expressing product features collaboratively. However, having sprint goal as list of user stories, based on team velocity, from my view reduces the business value of the sprint. Read more…
The setup is a project involving sub-contractors from different vendors working in highly regulated industry.
The objective is how to make these diverse skills work as self-organized team?
The challenges are:
- Strong command and control culture.
- Non streamlined views on how work needs to be done.
- People work independently with fear to become inter-dependent.
Read more…
For large organizations, projects are often characterized of being:
- Involve people from various departments with separate reporting structure.
- Involve contractors from multiple vendors.
- Introduce technology which is unfamiliar to the employees.
- General disagreement or even lack of appreciation of the project approach.
- Multiple chiefs and puzzled doers.
- Software development is sub-component of the project. Read more…
