Are You Ready to Stop Starting and Start Finishing? The Smart Way to Introduce WIP Limits
Introducing WIP limits is one of the most powerful approaches to reduce delivery times by aligning demand with capacity and keeping the focus on the most important work. Often though, introducing WIP limits meets resistance from within the team. People…
Does Your Kanban System Produce Reliable Probabilistic Forecasts? Thin-Tailed vs Fat-Tailed Cycle Time Distributions
When it comes to product management, the most pressing question always seems to be “When will this be done?”. Probabilistic forecasting has been proven to be one of the most reliable methods to make future predictions while achieving maximum accuracy…
How to Manage Unplanned Work in Kanban
If there are ghosts, goblins, witches, superheroes, cartoon characters, and a wild variety of oddly-dressed creatures knocking on your door and shouting “trick or treat!”, chances are it’s Halloween. You’d better cover your bases and shell out the sweets, or…
Does Your Kanban Board Reflect Reality?
All too often, as you are just getting started with evaluating your flow metrics, you find that the data you have collected is entirely unreliable. As a result, it is impossible to use that data to make data-driven decisions. Most…
How to Get Your Leadership Team on Board with Kanban Analytics
Every business strives to realize more revenue with less cash burn while continuing to delight their customers. Often though, the main sources of inefficiencies preventing business success are invisible. You need to turn on the light and reveal the current…
How to Make Reliable Probabilistic Forecasts Without Sizing Your Stories Into Even Pieces
Story sizing into even pieces is a widely-spread activity, often considered to be a prerequisite to making reliable future predictions. The concept of artificially splitting your work items into even pieces to be able to produce an accurate delivery forecast…
A Quick Guide to Dynamic Prioritization
How do you know which work item to start next? If you’re a Scrum practitioner you would probably sit down twice a month and arrange the top x number of items so your team knows what to work on. Usually,…
How Understanding Failure Demand Can Transform Your Product Into a Fit-For-Purpose Value Proposition
The typical narrative surrounding growing businesses is that, when the demand starts rising, they find they are struggling to cope. With a tremendous amount of customer requests constantly coming your way, you would probably assume that with the growth of…
The Fundamental Reason Why You Fail to Deliver on Time (Plus the 3-Step Product Management Guide to Meeting Your Commitments)
Businesses across the globe fail to deliver on time. In the early days of prison warfare, a deadline meant a line that was drawn around a prison to deter prisoners from crossing. If they did, they’d be shot dead on…
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…
