Students in my Kanban training classes ask great questions. Many of these questions come up so often that I have started a list of my "Top 10 (or so) things I wish people knew about Lean-Kanban."

Here is my list and I'd like to know what you think should be added. I will be filling in more information about these over the next few weeks, so keep checking in with me.

In The Importance of Mindsets, I described why your mindset, where you think from, is critical.  read more »

My alternative title to this blog was "If You Say Kanban Isn't About People, then You Don't Know What Kanban Is." But that sounded too much like a rant. However, I have to admit, much of this blog is a rant.

I was responding to a couple of postings on the Lean Development user group about how to accommodate push in a pull system. That is, how to have an organization work well when different parts work in different ways. I think this is a really important question – how do we change an organization when different parts of it work in different ways and have different drivers?

I am somewhat writing this blog in response to two things. The first is that over the last year I've had several complex adaptive systems "thinkers" out there challenge using lean-thinking to help teams because it supposedly relies on understanding cause and effect. The other is I'm planning to attend Jurgen Appelo's "Complexity vs Lean, the Big Showdown" at LESS 2010.  read more »

It is seductive to think about scaling Agile up from teams to the enterprise. It seems the correct path to take because you can almost always find a team or two where Agile methods lead to great improvements over Waterfall methods. But what works for a few teams at the local level often obscures the bigger picture: creating enterprise agility. Enterprise agility is the ability for an organization to deliver value quickly when needed. Sadly, I have seen many organizations achieve many successes locally – team agility – and move even further away from enterprise agility.

I saw an interesting blog today by Mike Dwyer called "Scrum is a Silver WHAT and you want to put it WHERE?" where he makes the pithy statement that "Scrum is not a silver bullet – it's a silver mirror." Now I definitely think this is a good blog and recommend you read it. However, I must admit to having had two simultaneous reactions to it – and realized it epitomized my concerns about how Scrum is promoted. My first reaction was – pretty cool.  read more »

I recently tweeted that I was sometimes irritated that when I've stated something about Scrum that I consider a shortcoming, I usually get called a "Scrum Basher". I would much prefer people engage me on what I have designated as a short-coming of Scrum. If, in fact, my assessment is right, I would be helping those who would be running into a problem. If, in fact, my assessment is wrong, it would be better to engage in a conversation with me to let both myself and others, that my opinion was wrong.

In an earlier blog (The 5-whys of Lean as an Answer to the But of Scrum ) someone suggested I was implying that we and our clients are infallible.  Unfortunately, that's not true.  read more »

It is essential that teams understand what the business value of the stories they are working on is. We must always remember that the software we are developing is useless, in and of itself. What is useful is what it enables – either by our customers (if we are a product company) or by our own staff using it (if we are in IT). Stories always need to be pieces of the business solutions – either providing it or creating the infrastructure to provide it.  read more »