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2013: Lean Concepts Such as Strategic Value, Operational Kanban Will Begin to Transform Enterprises

James Sutton | Dec 5, 2012 No Responses

Dec 052012

2013: Lean Concepts Such as Strategic Value, Operational Kanban Will Begin to Transform Enterprises

Last year I predicted that enterprises would take an increasingly holistic systems view. I said “they will take an increasingly strategic view of improvement, coordinating change across divisions and functions to achieve a higher overall level of performance. This trend is reversing [of] short-term, every-division-for-itself fractionalization…[so that] the Enterprise, at the end of 2012, will look more like an effective, coordinated whole and less like a collection of disparate…parts.” This happened as predicted. One of the best indicators of it is the rapid acceleration since that time of “reverse offshoring” or “inshoring.” Reverse offshoring is the return of business from lower labor-cost nations where it had been transferred in previous years. Offshoring is a useful …

A Healthy Skepticism of “Named” Approaches

Hillel Glazer | Dec 14, 2011 No Responses

Dec 142011

A Healthy Skepticism of "Named" Approaches

I see the demand for actual performance results over declarative symbolic victories (e.g., certifications) taking a significant bend upwards. I’ve already begun to see the more forward-thinking companies maturing in their thinking about how they use “named” business, technology, and management concepts, e.g., Scrum, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, ISO 9000, ITIL, COBIT, Devops, etc. There’s growing skepticism in the efficacy of popularized approaches. Executives are less likely to rush into using new ideas just because they’ve heard “the name”. Whether they’re skeptical for the right reasons or not, their cautious approach offers a better have a chance of implementing these “named” initiatives effectively, keeping them off their list of failures – a list that contributes to …

Upcoming IT Journal issue: The viral growth of Kanban in the Enterprise

Masa K. Maeda | Feb 28, 2011 1 Response

Feb 282011

Kanban has become the hot topic of discussion amongst the IT community since 2010, due to its accelerated rate of adoption and remarkable impact on organizations — from the few-employee company to the tens-of-thousands-employee company — where it has been adopted despite its young age. This fast pace is both good and bad, Kanban is benefiting organizations when adopted properly, but there is a risk of doing it wrong by rushing an adoption without fully understanding it. For example, people frequently ask if Kanban is a methodology for software development, or for software maintenance, or for project management, or a systematic approach to cultural change in the organization, or something else. Another frequent question is …

More Agile Orgs will Attain Higher Levels of Organizational Maturity

Hillel Glazer | Dec 22, 2010 No Responses

Dec 222010

2010 saw the rapid growth of quantitatively-driven performance improvement among organizations serious about getting lean and seeing results. Much of this can be attributed to newer techniques in agile practices such as Kanban for software, and related awareness resulting from these practices. Organizations getting serious about real, measurable improvement take being a learning organization to heart. They have started to explore blended approaches where they may bring together more than one “named” approach, firmly internalize the salient themes from them and synthesize a custom method that meets their specific business needs. Some of these organizations have also started to investigate and pursue use of CMMI as a framework for organizing and benchmarking their performance accomplishments. In …

Scrum Decline to Become Obvious; an Upsurge in Lean; and a Rise in the Use of Agile Techniques within the Data Community

Scott Ambler | Dec 14, 2010 3 Responses

Dec 142010

I have four predictions that I’d like to share with you: The decline of Scrum will become obvious in 2011. The shine started to come off Scrum in 2009 when teams started to publicly report that they had run into trouble applying it effectively and this snowballed in 2010. The squabbling between the Scrum thought leaders over their various certification schemes exacerbated the problem in 2010 and there seems to be no end in sight. My recent 2010 Scrum Certification survey found that only 27% of Certified Scrum Masters (CSMs) were willing to admit publicly that they were CSMs and another 37% would do so seldomly, an indication of the Agile community’s growing embarrassment surrounding “Scrum …

Scrum Will Suffer; Kanban Will Take Off

Jens Coldewey | Dec 7, 2010 9 Responses

Dec 072010

The next two years will show a major change in the Agile world: The predominant position of Scrum will suffer from both the inside and the outside. On the inside, the struggles within the community will weaken the thrust effect of the certification program. Right now, we already have two competing certification programs, and, at least in Europe, single trainers are trying to establish their private programs, too. This will lead to several dialects and maybe even more competing certification programs. Though competition generally helps progress a profession, I consider this a sign of increasing weakness for the Scrum Alliance. The ongoing merger between Scrum and XP – now marketed as “Scrum development practices” – …

The Viral Growth of Kanban in the Enterprise

Christine Generali | Dec 6, 2010 No Responses

Dec 062010

The March issue of Cutter IT Journal invites useful and thoughtful debate and analysis on the opportunities and challenges presented by implementing Kanban methodologies in the enterprise. We invite experts, IT professionals, consultants, customers, and all other Kanban practitioners to share their perspectives — either positive or negative — with Kanban implementation. We also encourage authors to go beyond Kanban as a methodology and address other related factors such as communication, collaboration, environment, end-user issues, and how Kanban has been used in conjunction with other methods to reach project success. Proposals of interest are due 20 December. To respond, please visit http://www.cutter.com/content-and-analysis/journals-and-reports/cutter-it-journal/callforpapers03.html

In a Kanban Adoption, Go Lean

Masa K. Maeda | Dec 6, 2010 No Responses

Dec 062010

I recently worked on Kanban adoption with a new customer, who informed me that Kanban was already underway and wanted me to help finish the adoption. On the first day, I was taken to the Kanban boards, two of them, and was introduced to the 15-person team. I noticed right away that the Kanban boards lacked a good number of essential elements to be considered an actual Kanban board, such as explicit policies and well-defined classes of service. Furthermore, the boards were not for separate projects. One was for the development phase; the other for the test phase. Also, the adoption work was delayed by a month because a key person (the champion) wasn’t available …

A Move Toward Value Innovation

Masa K. Maeda | Dec 3, 2010 No Responses

Dec 032010

Under pressure from the continuing economic crisis, enterprises are struggling to maintain their level of competitiveness, or even remain in the market. What has been considered key to success will begin to shift, from the search for effective methodologies to the realization that innovation and value are the most important differentiators for success. For many years, enterprises have considered effective management of scope, schedule, and budget as the key to success. This has been proven over and over to be incorrect. (Just ask the professionals you know. How many projects have they been involved with where scope, schedule, and budget were really effectively managed?) Furthermore, there are projects that accomplish this goal and still do …

Changing Playing Fields: The Impact of Crowdsourced Testing on Software Methods and IT Operations

Israel Gat | Jul 28, 2010 1 Response

Jul 282010

The Scrum v. Kanban debate has been relentlessly raging for the past eighteen months. One could only watch with fascination as polarized camps formed around what is after all a fairly dry software method issue. The intensity of emotions this debate generated could almost be compared with those expressed in the debate about abortions. As a practitioner who uses both methods, I tend to view them as arrows in my quiver. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. The important thing is suitability to the target environment, not the theoretical pros and cons. For example, one could prefer to use Scrum in development and Kanban in service delivery. A macro trend is starting to change …

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Posts Tagged 'kanban'

2013: Lean Concepts Such as Strategic Value, Operational Kanban Will Begin to Transform Enterprises

A Healthy Skepticism of “Named” Approaches

Upcoming IT Journal issue: The viral growth of Kanban in the Enterprise

More Agile Orgs will Attain Higher Levels of Organizational Maturity

Scrum Decline to Become Obvious; an Upsurge in Lean; and a Rise in the Use of Agile Techniques within the Data Community

Scrum Will Suffer; Kanban Will Take Off

The Viral Growth of Kanban in the Enterprise

In a Kanban Adoption, Go Lean

A Move Toward Value Innovation

Changing Playing Fields: The Impact of Crowdsourced Testing on Software Methods and IT Operations

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