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Applying Hoshin Kanri at Toyota
Toyota uses Hoshin Kanri to give direction on where they want to improve using Lean IT. Employees at various levels can exchange ideas about Hoshin items, and potentially get them approved by higher management. This approach makes results stronger and increases buy- in from the employees who contribute upfront.
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Continuous Improvement Beyond Retrospectives
If you want continuous improvement you can start with retrospectives, but you must go far beyond that with change management, culture change, and innovation. The most important thing in order to make change happen in organizations is creating new habits and changing your culture.
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Q&A with Fridtjof Detzner about Scaling and Continuous Improvement at Jimdo
How can you make a company grow without sacrificing it’s culture? InfoQ talked with Fridtjof Detzner, co-founder of DIY website creator Jimdo, about how Jimdo started and scaled up using agile and why Jimdo uses kaizen and retrospectives to improve continuously.
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Agile and Lean Service Management for Enterprises
Agile software development or Scrum is not enough to make your enterprise truly deliver on the Agile promises, says Dave van Herpen. He suggests that IT service management should apply agile and lean practices combined with DevOps to improve collaboration throughout the entire enterprise.
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Individual Yield
Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt, enumerates some practical points on individual procutivity. This article wonders how well these apply to software development and contrasts his list with that of other lists.
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Agility Meets Austerity
As western governments struggle with difficult debt to GDP ratios, the UK is turning to innovation and agile practices to help create a more efficient and less risky IT project delivery framework.
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A Conversation from the Trenches of Agility with David J Bland, Brad Murphy and Peter Saddington
A Friday afternoon conversation with some noted agile practitioners covering the current state and future trends of the methodological universe and how these are playing out in the real world. Sit back, pop open a beer and enjoy the banter between some of the sharpest agile coaches on the market.
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Kanban as Alternative Agile Implementation
Kanban systems for software, derived from the Toyota Production System, are an iterationless approach for scheduling work. Instead of using a time boxed iteration and planning meeting, the pulls stories from the backlog only when it has completed its previous work. Dave Nicolette thinks that its important to expand our repertoire beyond the basics become familiar with other tools like Kanban.
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Scrum-ban Paper Adds Kanban to Scrum
Corey Ladas has written an interesting paper titled "Scrum-ban" in which he describes how a Scrum team might introduce the lean practice of kanban. He goes on to describe an evolutionary process, which if taken far enough, replaces most of Scrum. Even for those who don't want to scrap Scrum and go lean, the paper provides a useful view into what kanban is and how it can augment Scrum.
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Agile Kanban: Visual Tracking Beyond the Team Room
In the beginning Agile was largely a developer-driven initiative, sometimes improving development processes only to find the real bottlenecks lay outside developer control. In his latest InfoQ article, Kenji Hiranabe analyses Lean manufacturing's "Kanban" visual tracking tool, how it differs from the Agile taskboard, and how it helps identify more far-reaching improvements.
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Leadership is not Obsolete for Self-Organizing Teams!
In this talk, software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about "the matrix problem", alignment, waste cutting, planning, standards and other topics including the role of measurement: "cash flow thinking" over "balance sheet thinking". InfoQ presents video of this popular talk from the Agile2007 conference.
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Kaizen in Lean Software Development
Lean methods employ Kaizen, or continuous improvement, to reduce waste and improve results on a regular, even daily, basis. On the leanagilescrum group, Alan asked, "Are there known techniques for facilitating kaizen activities within Lean/Agile software development?"
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Tips for Effective Kaizen Process Improvement
Agile software development and Lean Thinking go hand-in-hand for many practitioners. Six-Sigma blackbelt Mike Wroblewski has blogged some lessons learned from a recent kaizen session. People are a key variable in both manufacturing and software environments, so his lessons learned in manufacturing are also interesting for Lean Software practitioners using kaizen events for process improvement.
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Sowing Organic Change
Kevin Rutherford blogged recently on fostering change, rather than imposing it, this latter strategy being more likely to backfire. He's provided three tools useful to get the ball rolling and keep it moving.