I wanted to share some general accomplishments from our first quarter of using Kanban in terms of metrics.  Our cycle times have been slashed in half!  Our backlog is the lowest I've ever seen it at.  And we've been able to quickly identify blockages and fix those issues. I don't want you to think there's not room ...

It's time for a little feedback on where we are for our Kanban system for Change Manaement.  For explanations of how and why we are implementing this sytem, please look at the posts, Using Kanban to manage your maintainence backlog post.  , and the More on Using Kanban to manage your maintainence backlog.  First good thing ...

If you need more info on how to move your Project Management organization from mainstream or waterfall project management methods, here is an article from Doug Dicarlo that might be interesting.  Doug makes some points about the book Preston Smith wrote Flexible Product Development.  I think point 2 on his list is in my mind the most ...

Johana Rothman has a great article in stickyminds titled What Project Managers Need To Know About Testing.  Her main point is to make testing an integral part of your project plan.  I would argue that if you are using an agile methodology testing is baked into the project.  XP and Scrum assume that you have to pass acceptance tests ...

Corey Ladas has a post about document work standards.  This got me to thinking, how in our kanban we might document our work standards.  Our issue is that we are going all electronic.  We will have an overhead display to flash the kanban boards.  I had never thought about using information radiators for your standards in the ...

I took a vacation down to my favortie city, Orlando!  Actually Lake Buena Vista FL, home of Walt Disney World!  So of course the week of Thanksgiving, I wasn't Kanbanning,  but visiting the parks at WDW.  I'm always impressed with how the Disney company can handle the amount of crowds that they do.  If ...

If you have followed the Agile software development, you most likely have come across Mary and Tom Poppendieck's work like Lean Software Development This might interest you. Schumla is hosting a second Q and A with Mary Poppendieck.  This is a great opportunity to ask some tough questions, especially for those ...

As I last posted we are going ahead with our Kanban for Change tickets.  The visit with David Anderson (who wrote Agile Management for Software Engineering...) and Corey Ladas (His Blog is Lean Software Engineering)  really helped focus what we'd like to do at my place of work.  While have similarities, we do have some ...

If you have not been looking at how David Anderson is utilizing a Kanban system at Corbis, read his articles on it here.  The paper A Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering explains how they have implemented a pull system that utilizes lean and agile principles to assist in application mainatainence mode.  Davids group at Corbis ...

I wanted to follow up on my last entry.  One thing I didn't mention in my last post is how the TDD is accomplished.  I believe you can use both Unit Testing and Automated Customer Acceptance tests as in standard projects, in project with MOSS.  For Automated Customer Acceptance Tests, you could use something like Fitnesse.  ...