Tag: Kanban

Lean

Kanban saves the day

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I was brought in to deliver a project on-time with less than 2 months remaining. While the project scope and deliverables were clear, getting to the solution was not.

R&D was required to get some of the features delivered and that was expected to take up a significant amount of time. The team was cross functional and dispersed – from vendors to in-house application development folks to network and server infrastructure folks within Canada and the USA. There was no time for detailed planning. The deadline was non-negotiable and the project had to be delivered by the due date.

It appeared that delivering on time was a tall order and the team was wondering how in the world they would get it all done.

Agile

Agile project management using Kanban and Theory of Constraints

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I recently presented “Agile Project Management using Kanban & Theory of Constraints” at the PMI-NB lunch-and-learn and at Project World Business Analyst World Atlantic Canada. Since I got a lot of requests for the presentation, I figured this would be an easier way to distribute it to everyone. Feel free to write to me with comments, questions or clarifications.

Lean

Why Kanban for software engineering matters

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Donald, the CEO, sat staring at the phone. He just got off the phone with one of the customers. The project team had missed the delivery for the third time. And this was not the only project that was in trouble. “This is crazy. What”, he thought, “were we doing wrong? Why can’t we seem to get our act together and deliver projects to the plan? We should plan better. I better find Smith and find out what’s going on.”

Lean

Kanban, process design and unintended consequences

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A few years ago we embarked on developing a complex data acquisition solution to solve a business problem. Fast forward to successful project completion. On being complimented, one of the lead developers on the project said, “What we deployed was exceedingly simple. It wasn’t rocket science”. I was reminded of Goldratt’s statement, “… the key to problem solving is to accept that any real life situation, no matter how complex it initially looks, is actually, once understood, embarrassingly simple!” How true.

Agile

Combining Critical Chain and Kanban to improve capacity

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It has been close to two years since I embarked on the path of using Kanban within our software engineering teams and a year since I first piloted critical chain project management. Both concepts have benefited my projects. Why adopt the two simultaneously? They address two different needs: one looks into the future to determine if the project will be on time and within budget while the other highlights bottlenecks as they arise.

Agile

How Kanban resolves the resource manager and project manager’s dilemma

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Project managers are in a constant tug-of-war amongst themselves and the resource managers for people. The goal of the project manager is to complete the project on time, on budget and deliver to the scope. The goal of the resource manager is to ensure the maximum utilization of the people who report to him/her.

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