How to Read the Cumulative Flow Diagram [Infographic]
The Kanban Method can help teams manage their workflows more efficiently but relying on your Kanban board alone isn’t going to help you achieve a stable process. You also need a way to identify bottlenecks and stabilise your workflow using data visualisation tools. In this infographic, we’ll be explaining how to do that with the cumulative flow diagram. The Kanban Method is built around optimising cycle times, limiting WIP, and continuously delivering. There is a lot of critical flow information…
How to Reduce Cycle Times to Boost Customer Satisfaction and Build a More Productive Workforce
The cycle times of your workflow is the period required for a product team to develop and deliver a valuable outcome to a customer. There are two things that are important here – how quickly the customer needs the results to be ready, and how much time it takes your product team to develop and deliver them. To that end, it refers to the synchronisation between the requirements of the customer and what your internal processes can achieve. Although product…
How to Use Kanban Project Management to Harness the Power of Visual Insights and Maximise the Delivery of Value
Successful projects always start and finish with a plan, but it’s how you put that plan into motion that will ultimately make or break your project. Without a clearly defined process, project managers end up unable to manage their work efficiently, while teams work overtime to meet impossible demands. All too often, the result of a poorly executed project is a failed product delivered late by a team that’s lost motivation due to burnout. Kanban project management solves these problems…
Roads Untravelled: Value Stream Mapping
In an increasingly saturated market, you must be able to deliver value to your customers faster and more consistently than your competitors do. Value stream mapping shows you exactly how your process delivers value to your customers, which steps suffer from excess waste and helps you identify areas of improvement. What is value stream mapping The value stream is the series of steps required to deliver a product or a service to your customer. Regardless of the nature of the…
A Short Guide to Effective Daily Standups
The 15-minute standing meeting is everywhere in the Agile world. For some it’s a tool for collaborative productivity, for others, it’s yet another meeting that takes time away from what they really should be working on. What makes the difference between an effective daily standup and one that just wastes your team’s time? Our short guide is here to help you keep your standup meetings focused and effective. What is a standup? The standup meeting or daily standup is quite…
Lean Manufacturing Wastes: Muri
Reducing waste allows you to achieve more with your team, streamlining your processes and maximising your profits. In our previous articles, we looked at two forms of Lean Manufacturing Wastes: Muda (waste) and Mura (unevenness), when they are likely to appear, and what steps to take to reduce them. As part of their continuous improvement initiative, businesses generally first work on wiping out the 7 Mudas (Defects, Overprocessing, Waiting, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Overproduction) and keeping Mura down. This is a…
Lean Manufacturing Wastes: Mura
In our previous article, Lean Manufacturing Wastes: Muda, we began to explore the concept of waste and how to reduce it. Wastes in your process add extra costs, either to your customers or to your business. Reducing waste is the most essential step towards developing a smoother and more efficient process. The 7 Mudas (Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing and Defects) are often highly visible in your process and easy to single out. Many businesses reduce Muda, see some…
Lean Manufacturing Wastes: Muda
Larger profit margins can be boiled down to two actions – increasing output and improving efficiency. Frequently, businesses choose to increase their capacity to drive output, hiring staff and investing in new tools. They can also look for ways to work more efficiently with their existing resources. Reducing waste is essential in order to make processes more efficient. Costs from wastes are ultimately passed on either to your customers or your business. Putting prices up can mask waste costs to…
The Big Picture: Kanban Roadmap
Project managers are constantly balancing short-term responsiveness and long-term strategic planning. Striving for maximum agility by neglecting any plans and processes can result in miscommunication and uneasy customers. At the other extreme, trying to plan every detail too early in the process is equally dangerous. The power of Kanban is that it deals with risk quickly. Kanban lets you make sure that the most important items are accomplished first and the team is not distracted by low-priority items. Frustration with…
Borrowed Time: Kanban Flow Debt
Excessive debt slows progress and can become a huge burden. However, debt is not always bad and can be necessary to meet project goals. Nevertheless, debt must eventually be repaid. Flow debt in Kanban project management works according to the same principle. In this article, you will learn how Kanban flow debt is defined, how to measure it and how to prevent your flow debt levels from increasing in an uncontrollable manner. What is flow debt? Flow debt is when…
