March 22, 2017

SwiftKanban Product Update- February & March 2017

The last couple of updates of SwiftKanban have focused on some key features such as Cycle Time Threshold, revamped ESP Analytics and an enhanced To-Do Board.
October 17, 2016

Kanban and the Importance of Work In Progress (WIP) Limits

Attending Kanban Training 
July 21, 2016

Due Dates in Kanban Systems

Many teams adopting Kanban come from Agile background. Agile thinking has discouraged the use of Due Dates. Due Dates breed undesirable behavior. Focus on Due Dates results in teams working under significant pressure. Quite often, that translates into short cuts in Design/ Testing activities. The net effect is that work quality is compromised and technical debt piles up.
January 31, 2016

Kanban – The Product Manager/ Owner’s BFF!

Of all the roles in a software or product development organization, I will argue the Product Manager’s (or Owner’s) job is the most challenging. On the one hand, the task of figuring out just what to build is complex and multifaceted. On the other hand, in any reasonably mature product organization, there is so much work that is going on and so much new demand, that the Product Manager can wish all they want in terms of product innovation and focus on the product roadmap, but failure and customer demand pretty much hijacks most of the Dev capacity in the organization.
December 31, 2013

Energetic. Responsive. Trying Harder. 2014, Here We Come!

Energetic, responsive, trying harder - those were some of the best compliments we received from our customers.  As one of them, who switched from a competing product to us, said, "It looks like you guys are always trying harder and better than the rest of them." Absolutely!
October 4, 2013

How to handle Tickets during Sprint Planning?

That was the question posed in a recent discussion. The question further provides the following details – “I work within an agile team. We have a released product and we are still working towards a future release. Every sprint we receive anywhere from 0 to 5 tickets to fix bugs in the released product. Our team is composed of software engineers (to handle new development) and maintenance software engineers ( to handle tickets).
January 22, 2013

Benefits of Kanban: 300% Cycle Time Reduction!

Over the last few years of steady-state usage of Kanban in our product management and engineering teams, we have achieved a number of dramatic improvements. Even considering that for us, it was – and is – a case of eating our own dog-food, these improvements are nothing short of incredible for a small product company where every minute, every dollar, every feature that is value to a customer, counts! So, we thought we should share our experience and benefits with the software and IT community in the hope that some of these will help you benefit as much or more than what we have been able to do. This post is the first in this series.
May 4, 2012

Kanban – Evolutionary or Revolutionary?!

One of the key benefits that David Anderson, the renowned Kanban thought-leader and father of the Kanban Method for software development highlights about Kanban is that it is evolutionary and not revolutionary.  That is to say, it does not introduce a humongous new set of processes in an organization and cause massive disruption like traditional methods have tended to do.