Flow Focused

Flow Focused

Business Agility with Agile and Kanban

Author: Malcolm Bastien

  • Just Enough Kanban

    Just Enough Kanban

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    by

    Malcolm Bastien
    in

    One of the most helpful things you can do when facing a problem is to visualize the situation. In software or service delivery, kanban is a handy method that lets teams visualize and better manage their business or workflows. If you don’t know what else to do, make it visual. Find some way to make…

  • Mapping Options Using a Risk-Value Matrix

    Mapping Options Using a Risk-Value Matrix

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    by

    Malcolm Bastien
    in

    When it comes to dealing with all of the things competing for your attention, one habit I’ve picked up from practicing Getting Things Done for over ten years is to start writing down everything that’s on my mind and putting it all into an Inbox. The people I work with always have more work to…

  • Experimenting With Controlling Cycle Time Instead of WIP

    Experimenting With Controlling Cycle Time Instead of WIP

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    by

    Malcolm Bastien
    in

    Limiting how many stories or tasks can occupy any particular activity in a team’s flow is a commonly recommended practice for teams using kanban systems. This way, the team can avoid overloading their system, reduce multitasking, and improve focus and quality. Applying work-in-progress (WIP) limits to kanban systems at the story or task level reveals…

  • Don’t Write User Stories, Tell Stories

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    by

    Malcolm Bastien
    in

    User stories are narrative stories describing the goals that users and customers have. They are a way for teams to describe what they want to build in agile software development. But in the teams I see using stories, they’ve become more of a commodity of Agile. Stories are objects that get written, passed around, estimated…

  • The Power of Predictable Delivery

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    by

    Malcolm Bastien
    in

    With most of the Agile teams I’ve been exposed to, I’ve noticed that they spend easily over a hundred person-hours every month on practices like updating plans, reporting metrics, estimating, and sharing status updates. To them, these are some of the core practices that make them Agile. In general, as a way to be less…

  • Manage the Value, Not the Work

    Manage the Value, Not the Work

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    by

    Malcolm Bastien
    in

    Do you think of software development as an exercise in identifying the right problem, doing the right analysis and getting the right people to code the right features? Or is it more of a discovery and learning activity where you make a bet, build something and get feedback? In the former approach, organizations will create…