Synesthesia

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2012-01-06:

• Post Event Retrospective – Part III » Rally Engineering Blog

  retrospective kaizen agility

• Post Event Retrospective – Part II » Rally Engineering Blog

  retrospective kaizen agility

• Post Event Retrospective – Part I » Rally Engineering Blog

  agility kaizen retrospective

• Scaling Software Agility » Agile Portfolio and Program Management Keynote

  portfolio program agility @read

• Software package metrics

  software metrics development technical-debt

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-10-09:

• » Geoffrey B. West, “Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster” – Long Views: The Long Now Blog

  @read @retag

• Dialogue Sheets for Retrospectives and Beyond

  retrospective kaizen team process retrospectives tools

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-07-15:

• Helping Make A3 Work, Part 4 (of 4) — Jamie Flinchbaugh

  A3process A3 lean kaizen

• Helping Make A3 Work, Part 3 — Jamie Flinchbaugh

  A3process lean kaizen A3

• Helping Make A3 Work, Part 2 — Jamie Flinchbaugh

  A3process lean kaizen A3

• Helping Make A3 Work, Part 1 — Jamie Flinchbaugh

  A3 A3process lean kaizen

• Lean Manufacturing Blog, Kaizen Articles and Advice | Gemba Panta Rei

  A3 A3process lean kaizen

• The Seven A3 Problem Solving Steps in Detail by Debashis Sarkar

  A3 A3process lean

• http://asq.org/conferences/six-sigma/2009/pdf/proceedings/c6.pdf

  A3 A3process kaizen lean system:filetype:pdf system:media:document

• A3 problem solving template – Crisp AB

  A3 A3process kaizen lean

• Index card generator – version 2! – Henrik Kniberg’s blog

  agile backlog productmanagement productowner

• The A3 Process

  A3Process kaizen lean

• 500 Internal Server Error
  500 Internal Server Error
  none
• How to: iPhone push notifications from Google

  iPhone G Google

• if This, Then That

  webapps pipelining

• Time Management in a Multi-Project Environment

  time_management

• Azure Table Storage in IronPython

  azure ironpython

• Synchronizing your OCS Status with your SharePoint 2010 MySite Status

  none

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Bookmarks I’ve shared for 2011-07-07 to 2011-07-08:

• Kanban Links on reddit

  kanban reddit

• Lean-Kanban University

  Lean-Kanban lean kanban kaizen learning improvement

• Cloud computing insights from 110 implementation projects

  cloud ibm system:filetype:pdf system:media:document

• Cloud – Challenges and Opportunities for the C-Suite

  SunGard cloud businesscase system:filetype:pdf system:media:document

• Improvements on using a simple kanban for effective meetings « Benjamin Mitchell’s Blog

  kanban meetings personalproductivity

• Benjamin Mitchell’s Blog

  none

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Joe Dager (@business901) has posted a video interview with Dr. Michael Balle, the Gemba Coach at the Lean Enterprise Institute about Kaizen Teams without Kaizen Events, or Can Kaizen be part of Standard Work?

Summary

Balle makes some key points:

Standard work is about routine v non-routine, prescribed v non-prescribed

Standards are not the same as saying everything the same for everyone everywhere

Standards = a scientific process

• the few things we know “mountains of certainty” – standards are very useful here
• “the islands of we believe so” – standards are looser and we need to understand if the standard applies - need to do kaizen to understand why situation is different
• “the oceans” of “we just don’t know” – need to do kaizen to see if we can find a starting standard

Dager makes the point – how do we make this real for the busy middle-manager?

Balle’s view is that it is about a change of mindset, from “too many fires for Kaizen” to “the fires are in a state where I can live with them, I have to do the Kaizen first to reduce the number of fires”.

What is the first step of the 100 steps? What can you do in 1 minute every day?

Aligning the steps with the strategy, but break it down into small steps.

Typically takes five or ten  Kaizen to understand a topic.

Thoughts

For me this was a very timely post – in my last post on making a Kanban Review and Retrospective part of  Standard Work with the team I am coaching I describe our first steps to standardise the process of reflection – which should enable a bootstrapping to a more effective process.

It always helps to have a conceptual framework for what you do, and I sense  the differentiation between “mountains of certainty”, “islands of  we believe so” and “oceans of we just don’t know” will be most useful.

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I’m coaching  a cross-functional team working across IT operations, application support and development, using Kanban to manage everything larger than the most immediate support requests.

They already appreciate the importance of reviewing their work and process, so we’ve been trying to make this into  Standard Work.

Our first attempt is the 30 Minute Review and Retrospective

Review (max 10 minutes total)

Look at every story completed this week, for each (so ~1 min per story):

• What did we plan to do?
• What actually happened?
• Why?
• What would we do next time?

Retrospective (max 20 mins total)

• What do we want to do more of, what do we want to change or stop? (5 mins max)
• Go round the group – what have we done for the improvement actions we committed to last week? (5 mins max)
• Look at Cumulative Flow, Cycle Time and Lead Time – what issues do we see, what actions can we take? (5 mins max)
• Go round the group – each individual commits to an improvement action for next week (5 mins max)

Based on the initial couple of goes at this process, 30 minutes is very very tight. This week I am going to run an hour with them, and although an hour per week is quite a large percentage of the working week, I suspect that the volume of Kaizen opportunities we are finding warrants it.

What’s your experience of introducing reflective practice within a Kanban environment?

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-05-16:

• Top 10 Types of Resistance to ITIL Improvement Initiatives by Paul Wilkinson: BSMReview.com

  ITIL servicemanagement kaizen change

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-04-04:

• Business Case for Better Software Practices

  rightshifting

• “That’s the Way We (Used to) Do Things Around Here”

  rightshifting reframing neuroscience change

• The Improvement ROI Sawtooth

  kaizen rightshifting weltanschauung

• Public, Private and Enterprise Cloud: Economy of Scale versus Efficiency of Scale

  cloud

• Archive of Articles and Patterns by Robert Dilts

  NLP patterns Dilts

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Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2007-09-06

• The Importance of “So What?” in A3 Kaizen:
  Great summary post on the “A3 Kaizen” approach, and the importance of drilling down to root causes.
  Keywords: lean, kaizen
• Personal Unit Tests:

  Keywords: personalproductivity, personaldevelopment

• Visualizing Agile Projects using Kanban Boards:

  Keywords: agile, kanban, lean