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…
Lean Manufacturing Wastes: Muri
Reducing waste allows you to achieve more with your team, streamlining your processes, and maximizing 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…
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…
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…
Continuous Improvement: Kaizen
Improvement is not a one-time event. There is no shortage of techniques, tools, and software that present themselves as the solution to all of your problems, but real-world business environments are never that simple. Lasting change happens in increments, over…
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 Top 10 Benefits of Kanban
Kanban is a method applied across all fields of work to help teams drive down costs and become more efficient by visualizing and improving workflows. Kanban gives you the flexibility to build sustainable competitive advantage and empower your team to…
Understanding Your Data: Kanban Analytics
Kanban processes improve by continuously making incremental changes. Effective changes are built upon intelligible and unambiguous data. A picture is worth a thousand words – how many data points does a chart convey? In this article we’ll take a look…
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…
Evaluate Process Performance: Throughput Histogram
In the Kanban Method, throughput is the key measure of workflow efficiency. No matter how many tasks are being worked on, throughput only measures what has been completed. While kanban throughput is commonly displayed as a bar chart, you can…
Types of Frequency Distribution
Project forecasting is not a straightforward process – it’s a scientific and statistical exercise that deals with numerous interconnected variables. The value of these variables can have significant impact on your final prediction. Knowing the frequency distribution of these values…
Quantifying the Uncertainty: Monte Carlo Simulation
When making forecasts or performing risk analysis, it is impossible to escape from variability and uncertainty. Even with large amounts of past performance data at our fingertips, the future is unpredictable and unforeseen events can change the course of a…
Reading the Signs: Kanban Cycle Time Scatterplot Patterns
To make your processes more efficient, first you need to identify where you are falling behind. The Kanban method uses visual methods to analyse your performance and find areas to improve. Cycle time is a key metric for quantifying how…