Synesthesia

Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2013-02-16:

• Defect management in Kanban « Ian Carroll

  kanban defects flow

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2012-02-03:

• The Science of Kanban – Process

  kanban agile lean karlscotland

• The Science of Kanban – People

  kanban agile lean karlscotland

• The Science of Kanban – Introduction

  kanban agile lean karlscotland

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-07-12:

• 500 Internal Server Error
  500 Internal Server Error
  none
• Python LeanKitKanban Library in Launchpad

  python library leankitkanban

• SharePoint Remote BLOB Storage for Non-Experts – SharePointEduTech

  sharepoint BLOB storage

• The importance of understanding variation or how to avoid treating all contractors as thieves « Benjamin Mitchell’s Blog

  variation common-cause special-cause

• Devopsdays Mountain View June 2011 Kanban open space session recap

  agile kanban devops

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DevOps

There’s quite a lot now on the internet about “devops” – combining development and operations work to increase flow and reduce problems

• Google search for Kanban + Devops
• Links I’ve tagged “devops”

One of the key features of this approach is the idea that above a certain threshold of estimated duration, all operations work has to be included in the kanban board for visibility and flow management.

For example see these meeting notes from a DevOps conference in Ocean View, June 2011, where Lonely Planet shared their experience of this, with a threshold of 30 mins – i.e. any servicedesk issue which takes more than 30 mins gets moved to Kanban

I had a brief exchange on Twitter with Dominica DeGrandis, one of the DevOps leading lights, in which she confirmed that in her experience 1 hour was the most common point where teams found that the visibility and sharing was worth more than the overhead of putting into Kanban. This happens to be the pragmatic transition point adopted by the team I am coaching.

SLAs are a Problem!

Intuitively a follow up step will be to look at how this approach affects traditional service desk SLAs. I’m not a great fan of SLAs, as they tend to focus on failure and what happens after a failure – I’d rather that a service “just worked” and that resources went into keeping it that way.

I’m particularly disenchanted with the idea of SLAs when they are applied between two departments of the same business, not least because they stimulate the wrong sort of behaviour, in particular the chasing of local optima. The SLA-driven approach also encourages managers on the “consumer” side of the agreement to pay no attention whatsoever to systemic problems of their own making, to the ultimate detriment of the overall firm.

Having just read Bob Marshall’s Marshall Model of Organisational Evolution I can see that the frustrations I am expressing are a factor of the transition zone between the Analytic and Synergistic organisational mindsets.

I find John Seddon another source of stimulating ideas, and his piece on “Why do we believe in economies of scale?”  has some particular insights to how the SLA mentality creates organisational waste.

I humbly offer a few more thoughts to the debate:

• “Incident management” as a process is focused on failure, and managing the impact of failure rather than removing the causes (and yes I know there is a whole other ITIL process of “Problem Management”)
• SLAs focus resource on local optima (fix this incident for this user) rather than on the “best value for the whole firm at this time”
• Incident management systems tend to accumulate backlogs of failure demand which represent inherent waste, and which also clog flow making the work to address underlying causes inherently less efficient
• Efforts to create a synergistic “OneTeam” approach focused on flow are undermined by too much interrupt-driven work. Integrating the interrupt-driven work into the flow gives a much better sense of how to “add the most value possible right now”

The way I explain this to colleagues is usually along these lines:

The business has invested a fixed amount into IT development & support

Usually (especially in small / medium business) there is  a constraint within the technology team

Therefore the best value to the business from that investment is through:

• elevation and exploitation of the constraint
• reducing lead time
• prioritising based on economic cost of delay

All of which are delivered by a tuned Kanban system.

To make sense of this we need to educate ourselves and our colleagues about the systemic dysfunctions caused by trying to force a system to work faster than the constraints allow. It often takes time – for far too many people from the Analytic mindset the first response is “they just have to work harder”

How about you?

I’d love to hear from other people grappling with these issues – please comment here or tweet me (@Synesthesia)

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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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-06-23:

• Introducing Kanban, Flow, and Cadence
  Good overview post by Karl Scotland
  kanban flow cadence agile karlscotland

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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 2011-06-22:

• The Product Backlog Board

  productowner backlog product_management agile portfolio

• GetFriday – Life gets better with GetFriday

  virtual-assistant outsource

• Virtual Assistant | Virtual Secretary | Executive Assistants | Research Services – Brickwork India

  virtual-assistant outsource

• Agile Portfolio Planning | Scaled Agile Delivery.com

  product_management productowner portfolio cost-of-delay backlog agile lean kanban

• Cost of Delay Economics | Scaled Agile Delivery.com

  lean agile backlog cost-of-delay product_management productowner portfolio

• Introduction to Excel Services and Excel Web Access – SharePoint Server – Office.com

  sharepoint sharepoint2007

• A Lean, Economic Approach to Prioritizing Work « Scaling Software Agility

  lean product_management productowner portfolio_management agile

• Kanban

  kanban lean anderson

• An Agile Illusion: How That Nice Backlog is Actually Decreasing Your Team’s Agility

  kanban lean agility backlog software personalproductivity

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-06-16:

• Blog | Personal Kanban

  kanban personalproductivity lean sanity

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-04-11:

• Lean Software Management BBC Worldwide Case Study

  lean kanban IEEE

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-04-05:

• Social media and the prof svces firm

  socialmedia sales professional-services

• Kanban Overview And Experience Report Export

  dpjoyce kanban development lean visualmethods

• Visual Management Blog · Articles tagged Kanban

  kanban development visualmanagement visualmethods lean

• Evolution of kanban States – Part 3

  kanban lean development dpjoyce

• A Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering on Software Systems

  kanban lean productivity agilemanagement davidjanderson rickgarber system:filetype:pdf system:media:document

• Kanban for Service Desks – Agile Development Experts | VersionOne

  kanban lean productivity servicedesk devops

• Meetings, there is a better way

  productivity

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-03-24:

• Tours, Demos, Screenshots

  requirements development SAAS

• Large-Scale Agile Design
   "Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don't construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden," 
  architecture ea development
• Microtask | Home

  microtask startup crowdsourcing

• Business Documents UK

  templates

• InfoQ: Product Owner Patterns

  productowner product_management agile development

• Five Core Properties of a Kanban Implementation | limitedwipsociety.org

  kanban

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-03-08:

• Visual Management Blog · Using information visualization to manage agile projects

  agile management blog visual kanban scrum information

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2011-03-02:

• flow.io: Lean project management based on kanban

  software lean kanban SAAS agile tools

• Swift-Kanban

  kanban software lean SAAS agile tools

• Kanban Tool product tour – see how to make the most of your time

  kanban software lean SAAS agile tools

• Kanbanery » Supercharge your productivity

  kanban software lean SAAS agile tools

• LeanKit Kanban – Lean Process Management

  kanban software lean SAAS agile tools

• TargetProcess

  kanban software tools agile lean

• Tools Journal – Top 15 Kanban Tools In An Agile World

  kanban software tools agile lean

• Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

  lean kanban agile development software process

• Kanban/Scrumban – taking scrum outside its comfort zone

  agile lean kanban scrumban scrum slideshare

• James Shore: Kanban Systems

  kanban agile lean

• LeanKit Kanban Support – API

  leankit api kanban SAAS

• Actinic E-commerce Shopping Cart Software

  e-commerce

• Snow Valley

  e-commerce SAAS

• InfoQ: Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both

  software process kanban scrum agile lean

• Software Process and Measurement Cast

  software process kanban scrum agile lean podcast

• Kanban In Time-Boxes: The Cadence of WIP and Sprints

  kanban scrum agile lean

• The Essence of the Three Rightshifting Transitions (Part 1)
  Ad-hoc tp analytic
  rightshifting

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-12-11:

• Using RavenDB with ASP.NET MVC

  development nosql ravendb

• Excellent #kanban overview from @agilemanager

  kanban lean

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-10-26:

• Don’t try to negotiate special treatment from cloud providers, warns Google

  Informationage articles cloud-computing dataprotection

• Implications of Technical Debt Uncertainty for Software Licensing Negotiations « The Agile Executive
  Action Item: Before licensing an enterprise application or renewing an existing license, ask the vendor for technical debt data for the application and the plans to reduce the debt
  technicaldebt enterprise_it
• Applying Kanban to IT Processes (Part 5)

  kanban lean ITSM

• Applying Kanban to IT Processes (Part 4)

  kanban lean ITSM

• Applying Kanban to IT Processes (Part 3)

  kanban lean ITSM

• Applying Kanban to IT Processes (Part 2)

  kanban lean ITSM

• Applying Kanban to IT Processes (Part 1)

  kanban lean ITSM

• Modelling Behaviour « on Enterprise Architecture
  Excellent article on how to incorporate Business Capabilities into a model
  modelling architecture EA enterprise_architecture
• SearchHash
  make your own spreadsheet of hashtagged tweets
  searchhash socialmedia twitter_tools
• The Stack: The Fifteen (now Sixteen) Classes of the Social Business Software Suite
  Interesting categorisation by Jeremiah Owyang – may be useful adjunct to help thinking about the architecture of personal and network learning/knowledge management
  socialmedia socialsoftware stack
• Managing Yourself: What’s Your Personal Social Media Strategy? – Harvard Business Review

  HBR socialmedia brandyou

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-10-25:

• Use of Kanban in the Operations Team at Spotify

  kanban spotify infoq

• Shibboleth demoo

  authentication identity security switch shibboleth

• 10 Apps for Monitoring Social Media

  socialmedia tools

• Strategies for sharing visual information with others

  information visualisation

• A Guide to WordPress Custom Taxonomy

  wordpress tutorials howto

• WordPress Custom Post Types Guide

  wordpress tutorials howto

• The State of Product Management 2010
  BBC study of product management best practice in UK digital media
  product_development digitalmedia media_strategy system:filetype:pdf system:media:document
• Find Out What Program is Secretly Accessing Your Hard Disk Drive

  sysadmin

• sixrevisions.com by Mobify
  9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension
  webmaster
• 15 Google Chrome Extensions for People Who Build Websites

  chrome webmaster

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-10-07:

• Agile Techniques: Getting Started With Kanban

  agile kanban

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Bookmarks I’ve shared for 2010-09-30 to 2010-10-01:

• Deleting WordPress Revisions « Weblog Tools Collection

  wordpress revisions howto

• The Case Against Value Stream Mapping

  kanban lean VSM

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-06-13:

• Kanban for Service Desks

  lean agile service_management kanban service_desk

• Scum v Kanban
  Different methods, different change drivers
  scrum kanban agile change lean

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-05-01:

• Agile Architectural Epic Kanban System: Part 3 – State Machine View

  epic kanban agile architecture ea productowner product_development portfolio

• Estimating Features

  features estimating agile product_development product productowner portfolio

• Prioritizing Features

  agile productowner product_development portfolio backlog ROI cost-of-delay

• Awasu API

  awasu

• Virtual Team Member Dolly

  agile virtual-teams

• You’re Just Going to Fail, So Don’t Bother – 6 Hard Truths about Scrum

  agile scrum @read

• Testing Small Stories

  testing agile @read

• New to agile? Keep it very simple

  agile @read

• Effectiveness of a real product stream

  agile workflow @read

• Inserting Awasu Data Into Microsoft Word

  awasu word dynamic-documents

• Patterns and Practices of Lean Software Development
  Excellent post by Corey Ladas that pulls together a large range of concepts relating to the workflow of software development
  patterns software lean workflow
• CONWIP systems
  Constant Work In Progress – simplest form of Kanban
  systems lean conwip kanban workflow
• louisgray.com: Google Checkout Web Element Simplifies E-Commerce

  WebServices Google

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-03-18:

• Using Credit Limits to Constrain “Development on Margin”

  agile technical-debt refactoring

• Should IT keep its distance from social media?

  socialmedia it-v-business

• The Total CIO: The Many Faces of the CIO

  cio

• Windows Azure Platform Training Roadmap

  architecture cloud-computing azure

• Using Groovy Scriptom to report on Outlook
  Groovy scriptom allows Java-based scripting of Windows ActiveX and COM objects
  groovy scriptom scripting
• Kanban’s Not Better than Scrum, It’s Just Smaller

  kanban agile scrum

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-03-08:

• SPARQL

  semanticweb SPARQL

• An Agile Architectural Epic Kanban System: Part 2 – The Model

  agile kanban ea enterprise_architecture

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-03-02:

• kief’s blog

  @read

• An Agile Architectural Epic Kanban System: Part 1 – Introduction
  Dean Leffingwell starts to turn his attention to agile architecture
  agile kanban architectural enterprise_architecture ea

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2010-02-01:

• VersionOne Community:Guide – Kanban
  Configuring VersionOne for Kanban teams
  kanban versionone agile lean

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Bookmarks I’ve shared on 2009-12-24:

• Our New Development Process
  Latest of several posts by Dave Goerlich on applying agile to small teams
  agile kanban via:kjscotland

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Here are some sites I’ve started following this week:

• limitedwipsociety.org – “the home of kanban for software development”
• A Load of Cobblers – Steph Gray is Head of  Digital Engagement at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and his main blog is Helpful Technology. A Load of Cobblers is his Tumbleblog of useful web tools.
• Kaizen Notebook by Evan Durant (via Jamie Flinchbaugh) – some good examples of applying Lean to everyday life.

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2008-07-15:

• Scrum-ban
  merging lean/kanban methods into a Scrum environment
  scrum agile lean

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2008-02-25:

• If estimation is harmfulâ�¦ then, whatâ��s not?

  lean agile

• Estimation considered harmful « epistemologic
  discussing
  lean agile
• Lean software development: An iteration-less agile process

  lean agile

• A Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering on Software Systems
  David J Anderson and Rick Garber – experience at Corbis<br>
  agile kanban
• What engineering has in common with manufacturing and why it matters – AC
  Alistair Cockburn on the rationale for aplpying ideas and approaches from Lean Production to (software )engineering.
  no_tag
• Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments

  agile/metrics agile

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2008-02-05:

• Principle: Little’s Law

  littles_law queueing_theory

• Poppendieck: Managing The Pipeline

  poppendieck agile kanban toc

• No More Iterations
  Wayne Allen documents the start of an experiment to move an agile development team onto a kanban-based, non-iterative workflow.
  agile kanban via:kevinrutherford
• How You Slice It
  Jeff Patton article on slicing up top-level requirements into spans and releases…<br>
  pdf agile

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

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user Synesthesia on 2007-03-28

• Kanban in Action:
  David J Anderson describes the application of Kanban “pull” techniques to scheduling work through a software sustaining team.
  Keywords: Agile, Software, Agile/Methods, KanBan, Lean
• Kayuda:
  Kayuda is a web-based visual wiki, a mind-mapping tool, and a non-linear writing tool that allows you to track ideas and the relationships between them.
  Keywords: Wiki, Mindmapping, Collaboration
• Comparison of web-based mind mapping applications:
  Chuck Frey surveys the field for web-based mind-mapping. Conclusion: Mindomo top on features, Mindmeister top on input/output and other workflow aspects, Bubbl.us and Thinkature lagging badly…
  Keywords: Mindmapping