User Stories: Delivering Value, One Piece at a Time
Understanding what you are working on, and more importantly why you are working on it, is at the heart of business success. User stories play a central role in bridging the gap between the customer and the delivery team while promoting a culture of collaboration, innovation and shared leadership. Back in the day, Business Analysts would gather the requirements piece by piece, then staple them together in one, chunky file, which would be divided back into smaller deliverables that fit…
Fit for Purpose Class Review: Product and Service Improvement for Survival & Success
As the European heatwave sets new temperature records across the continent, Spaniards know how to cool themselves. The country’s favorite cocktails, Leche de Pantera, Sangria, Agua de Valencia and Calimocho are refreshing, delicious and just the thing you need when the sun is at its highest. Truly fit for purpose. Is your business fit for purpose? Do you know who your customers are, what they want and need? More importantly, are you keeping a finger on your customers’ pulse and…
Kanban Roles: The Right Work, Done Right
From ideation to delivery, work flows through the value stream until it reaches the end customer. The Kanban Method is designed to optimize the flow of work as it moves through the value stream. It’s a system that works upon the speed and efficiency of your delivery by minimizing waste and team overburden, outside of the value stream. To manage this approach, two Kanban roles have emerged – Service Request Manager (SRM) and Service Delivery Manager (SDM). Both SRM and…
Flow Efficiency: Powering the Current of Your Work
How can we be more efficient? What’s holding us back from delivering great customer value, sooner? These are pivotal questions shared by all success-driven product managers. Productivity rises with the improvement of team engagement and working practices. The greatest leverage in increasing productivity though is focusing on avoiding delays. Eliminating the causes that block our work and accumulate waiting time is the best way of getting more done, with less effort. As Daniel Vacanti says in Actionable Agile Metrics for…
5 Drivers of Sustainable Team Engagement
An engaged and enthusiastic team stands behind every thriving business. Supporting an environment of a strong organizational culture where people feel trusted, respected and valued is a recipe for success. Unfortunately, not all businesses recognize this. Figures from Gallup suggest active employee disengagement costs the US working market around $500 billion each year in lost productivity and high turnover. You can put a dent in these dire statistics. Promoting team engagement in a workplace begins with leadership. Your team members…
Kanban Backlog: A Guide for Self-Managed Teams
Effective backlog management is pivotal to any successful project. Prioritizing the right work in the right order plays a key role in continually delivering customer value. Manually prioritizing all backlog items, however, can be quite time-consuming. Moreover, without clearly defined criteria specifying the priority of the work items, what’s most important and what actually brings value to your business becomes questionable. The Kanban Method suggests an approach of backlog management that reduces the effort of maintaining your backlog and enables…
How to Use the Nave Power-Up in Trello
We’re excited to announce our integration with Trello – Kanban teams can now use Nave without ever leaving Trello. The Nave Power-Up allows you to create immersive analytical charts from your Trello boards – past, current, and upcoming. All charts will be updated the moment any change occurs on your board. Want to see the big picture of your project and gain actionable insights for a more efficient workflow? Here’s how you use the Nave power-up for Trello. See a…
Aging Work in Kanban: Tasks that Linger in Your Flow
One of the most quoted sayings in Kanban translates to: ”stop starting and start finishing.” This principle of not starting new work until the task at hand is completed, also called a Kanban pull system, is one of the central ideologies in Kanban. A well-implemented pull system increases workflow efficiency and prevents teams from overcapacity and burnout. Essentially, tasks are moving forward if and only if a pull signal has been triggered to indicate a new slot has freed up….
Productive Synergy: Kanban vs Scrum
Both Kanban and Scrum are designed to help teams build better products and services with fewer obstacles along the way. However, a lot of product teams still question whether they should use Kanban or Scrum in order to deliver outstanding value to their customers. But the reality is that you shouldn’t choose between the two; rather, you should discover which practices work best for your team and flex the system accordingly. And by flexing, we mean using Kanban and Scrum…
Linking Nave with Jira in Under a Minute
You asked and we’ve delivered; Jira teams can now use Nave to optimize their software development processes. Follow our three-step guide to configure Nave with Jira quickly and easily. Step 1: Log into your Jira Software as a user with ‘Jira Administrator’ permissions. Choose Jira Settings from the main menu. Select Products. Then click on Application links. You’ll be asked to enter the application link – type in https://getnave.com and click on Create new link. On the warning Configure Application URL…
5 Key Qualities Successful Project Managers Have in Common
Managing a project, whether we’re talking about software development or planning a corporate event, can be daunting to say the least. The reality is that there is no secret formula that will make your project unwrap flawlessly; very often you’ll stumble upon a series of challenges and obstacles before you reach success. And the ability to overcome those unexpected challenges and deal with them on the go is what makes a successful project manager. A well-versed project manager will be…
Kanban Pull System: A Simple Way to Increase Efficiency
Unlike a push system, where work is pushed onto teams regardless of their capacity, pull systems prevent team overburden and increase workflows efficiency. Teams pull work as they finish what they started, while keeping their focus on the highest priorities. Kanban pull systems significantly improve productivity and decrease delivery times. How Does the Kanban Pull System Work? To implement and maintain a pull system with the Kanban Method, you need to follow four main steps: visualise your workflow, establish a…
Workflow Efficiency: Balancing Demand Against Throughput
Every process has a bottleneck. The Theory of Constraints states that, in order to improve any system, the weakest link must be eliminated. Once a bottleneck has been identified and resolved, the flow of work moves on to the next one to deal with. This is a continuous improvement process that optimises the efficiency of your system. Workflow efficiency is determined by the consistency and predictability of your workflow. A stable and predictable workflow is enabled through balancing demand against…