The Top 3 Benefits of Introducing Queue States to Your Kanban System Design
Using queue states within our processes is the cornerstone of achieving high flow efficiency. Introducing queue states to our system designs not only enables us to manage our work effectively but also uncovers opportunities for improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be…
What is a Commitment Point in Kanban?
One of the top reasons behind delaying (or even canceling) work that has already been started is the act of early commitment. When our work items move into the delivery process while we still have a little knowledge about what…
Kanban for Design & Innovation Class Review: The 5-Step Process to Narrowing Down Your Customer Requests
Are you working on the right things? Even if you have a well-established downstream process, to be able to deliver actual value to your customers and translate output to an outcome, you need to narrow down the funnel of options…
3 Strategies for Learning from Failure To Grow Your Business
Learning from failure is the cornerstone of continuous improvement. Perceiving your shortcomings as opportunities will ultimately facilitate an environment of motivation, engagement and dedication. Way too often, I have conversations with customers at Nave who are trying to discard certain…
The 100% Utilization Paradox: How to Achieve Optimal Workflow Efficiency All While Relieving Team Overburden
Avoiding a 100% utilization of your employees’ time is the only way to achieve 100% workflow utilization. Your delivery speed and the predictability of your systems depend on how efficiently you’re managing the flow of work. Even though it sounds…
How to Preserve the Predictability of Your Workflow Using the Health Zones on the Aging Chart
The health zones on the Aging Chart will help you stay on track with your commitments and ultimately preserve the predictability of your system. Often, we make the mistake of assuming that our projects will go ahead exactly as we…
Why You’ll Struggle to Achieve Optimal Business Outcomes Unless You Stop Comparing Teams’ Performance
Comparing teams’ performance is neither fair nor relevant. I’m very excited to finally get to watch the Olympics this year. Countries all over the world will send their best professional athletes who, throughout the competition, will truly give it their…
Why Perfectionism Will Never Let You Push that Launch Button
Perfectionism is a fallacy that leads to overplanning, procrastination and failure to launch. Back in the day, when we were just a couple of months away from releasing the initial version of Nave, one of my teammates was delegated with…
How to Bring Purpose to Individuals’ Idle Time to Increase Your Business Capabilities
Optimizing individuals’ idle time contradicts the optimization of the flow of work. The cornerstone of achieving predictable delivery systems is aligning teams’ capability with business demand. The most efficient way to get things done is to only start as much…
How to Set WIP Limits on Your Columns When You’re Just Getting Started
Limiting work in progress is a commonly-used activity practiced by countless Agile teams. And it is the most effective tool you could possibly use to create a strong, clear focus for your team and dramatically improve your delivery speed. However,…
How to Use Kanban Analytics to Streamline Your Scrum Events
More and more Scrum teams realize the benefits of adopting Kanban to manage their work more effectively. And the benefits are countless. Adopting practices from both worlds is a very effective strategy, which provides many businesses with an unprecedented competitive…
The 3 Mistakes I Made by Using a Kanban Blocked Column (+ What I Learned from Them)
If an item is blocked for weeks, do you keep it in the same column and allow it to occupy the WIP in that column, or is it more convenient to move it to a dedicated Kanban blocked column? Back…
The Flaw of Tracking Individual Performance
What you measure shows what you value! If we’re measuring individual performance, that clearly indicates to each person in the team that we value individual performance. If your team members think that individual performance is a metric of value, they…