Achieving a More Predictable Workflow: Average Age of Work in Progress
What does it mean to maintain a stable system, and, moreover, why does this actually matter? The short answer is that stable systems translate into predictable systems. Predictable systems enable you to give a confident answer to the quite common question “When will this be done?”. They enable the possibility to create accurate delivery forecasts based on your past performance, thus producing highly reliable service level agreements. And, furthermore, this can be achieved with less effort and time than what…
Leverage Your Improvement Efforts: Cycle Time Breakdown
One of the most efficient ways to achieve a robust and highly productive business operation is to pay close attention to the bottlenecks in your system and manage them effectively. In his book ‘Theory of Constraints’, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt defines a bottleneck as “anything that limits a system from achieving higher performance versus its goal”. The key to manage these highly undesired success inhibitors is to fully recognize but not fight the symptoms. Instead, managers need to adhere to a…
Your Hiring Process, Optimized: How to Hire Dependable Freelancers, Faster?
The modern workforce is rapidly swapping the security of an office-based, nine-to-five job with the flexibility of freelancing. In fact, figures from Forbes suggest 59% of U.S. companies now use a flexible workforce to some degree, with new tactics to attract and hire the best talent emerging by the day. In this transformed hiring landscape, it’s important to remember that working from home is vastly different from working in an office cubicle, and recruiters ought to look for specific traits…
A Big Thank You from Nave!
It’s been a busy year for us here at Nave, so it’s time to let our hair down, have some fun & celebrate the end of a successful year. But, none of it would have been possible without your trust and help. To that end, we’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who supported us during this incredible year! To Our Customers We have always put our customers first, which is why we’ve worked hard to bring…
The Art of Effective Management: Trust, Respect, Appreciation
I would like to tell you a story. I want to tell you a story that repeats itself very often. In an environment where there is no concept of flow and work gets pushed onto teams expectations become unrealistic. When the focus is on starting more work rather than finishing old work, results get delayed. Management feels the urgency to push even more work to make up for the delays. Employees work overtime trying to handle all the requests regardless of…
Data-Driven Decision Making: The Value of Probabilistic Thinking
More than 50 years ago, Peter Drucker, a management consultant and author, described as the founder of modern management, predicted we would shift to a knowledge society. He said information would change the way people work – that knowledge will become the most important economic resource. Instead of generating value through physical labor with their muscles, people will do it with their minds. Drucker described these people as “knowledge workers”. So, who is a knowledge worker? Simply described, a knowledge…
Maximize Your Predictability: How to Manage Blocked Work in Kanban
Building a robust, reliable system that enables a smooth, predictable delivery of work requires a great deal of effort. However, even with an efficient Kanban pull system in place, one where the team pulls the work themselves, WIP limits are set up and team members are autonomous, there will be tasks that inevitably get stuck in the workflow. Blockers come in all shapes and sizes. From dependencies between tasks, teams, and third parties, to a lack of information or unclear…
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. If you use Jira Server to manage your process, and your instance is not exposed publicly, or you just prefer to control the data that you upload to the cloud for security reasons, please follow our guidelines on how to load your data using JSON or CSV file. Here is our three-step guide to configure Nave with Jira quickly and easily. Step 1:…
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…
