3 Strategies for Effective Demand Management
Effective demand management is the cornerstone of delivering results in a consistent manner and keeping your commitments. And the balance between demand and capacity is in its foundation. When demand exceeds your capability, delivery times increase and, in the end,…
You Should Never Resort to Story Point Estimation Again
Story point estimation is a widely known technique that Scrum teams use to plan their work. However, this approach is not objective and has the potential to hinder your performance. There’s a very simple explanation that we can use to…
The Top 5 Kanban Hits of 2020
2020 has been, undoubtedly, a markedly unusual year for a variety of businesses. Teamwork and collaboration have had all sorts of new challenges thrown their way, and so assessing our performance has never been so vital. Luckily, 2020 has also…
Why Your Performance Will Decline If You Don’t Stop Moving Cards Backward on Your Kanban Board
Moving cards backward on your Kanban board is one of the most common antipatterns that agile teams practice. And often, the negative effect it has on your productivity is not obvious. If a card doesn’t meet the criteria from the…
How to Reduce the Impact of Blockers on Your Delivery Times by Using Blocker Clustering
Managing blockers effectively is the first step towards revealing the obstacles that cause delays and hinder your delivery speed. One of the practices that drive continuous improvement is blocker clustering. The blocker clustering technique enables you to track the impact…
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…
3 Strategies to Help Your Team Embrace Flow Metrics
When it comes to achieving predictability, it’s the collaborative effort that brings everything together to deliver sustainable results. Sustainable predictability comes with effective management of the flow of work. You need to manage your workflows effectively to be able to…
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,…