I’ve read a couple of tweets today (demonstrating that Twitter perhaps sometimes makes sense) and I’m aggregating them here:
Jason Yip twitted a link to this short, clever blog post from Matt Wynne defining kanban:
- There are no iterations: only now. Work at a pace you can truly sustain.
- Done means it is in the user’s hands. Nothing less.
- Limit the Work in Progress. This forces you to get things done, or you’ll have nothing else to do.
- Get better all the time. Keep tuning your process and tools to fit the way you need to work today – make kaizen a culture, not an event. Everyone is responsible.
- Decide with data. Collect the data you need in time to make responsible decisions.
What scares me is the lack of iterations in the Kanban system, how can you keep the focus high on the team?
Just few minutes earlier Henrikk Niberg was twitting:
Ouch, Kanban + Pomodoro hurts. Tells you exactly how inefficient and behind schedule you are, and why. Pain leads to learning…
What’s scares me about the pomodoro is the too fined grained knowledge of what’s going on, with the big risk of introducing waste in the process… And its rigidity…
It seems that a lot of people around the world are now using those two techniques, anybody has some real experience of using them together in a project?
One Comment
I’d say that time is still used to create focus but it’s on a single item, not a batch of things. The timeboxed “iteration” is more about the sampling. A common dysfunction I’ve seen are people rushing at the end of a timebox rather than maintaining focus and progress throughout.
The more interesting question is whether an evenly paced way of working is the most appropriate. For business-as-usual activity, probably but when we start approaching R&D… probably not.