This FREE eBOOK DOWNLOAD by Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin is excellent ! It clears up the fog, so you can figure out how Kanban and Scrum might be useful in your own environment. Thanks to InfoQ for posting it.
There isn’t a single “best” way to do things; you have to think for yourself and figure it out – based on your situation !
LEARN ABOUT…
- the difference between Scrum and Kanban.
- their strengths and limitations,
- when to use each
- how and when to improve upon Scrum, or any other tool you may happen to be using.
- how to apply them in real life situations
- and more….
Mary Poppendieck writes:
Henrik Kniberg is one of those rare people who can extract the essence of a complicated situation, sort out the core ideas from the incidental distractions, and provide a crystal clear explanation that is incredibly easy to understand. He makes it clear that these are just tools, and what you really want to do is have a full toolkit, understand the strengths and limitations of each tool and how to use them all. The important thing is not the tool you start with, but the way you constantly improve your use of that tool and expand your toolset over time.
David Anderson, the founder of Kanban, writes,
Kanban is proving useful to teams doing Agile software development but equally it is gaining traction with teams taking a more traditional approach. Kanban is being introduced as part of a Lean initiative to morph the culture of organizations and encourage continuous improvement.
..
Get an overview of Agile approaches starting with eXtreme Programming (XP) & Scrum and then hear about Lean-Agile and its team oriented Kanban for software process.
Early Agile methods have been overly-team centric and have eschewed management. While 2nd generation Agile methods build on a decades old history of Lean thinking and have extended agility in three ways that are not only required for an enterprise engagement but also for creating synergies that improve Agile at the team level:
- Extending the Team to across the Enterprise
- Extending Individual skill sets to Systemic Thinking
- Extending the Worker to include Management
Read More…
Scrum is not a hard concept to understand. But there are a lot of parts ot making it successful. I found a great article that explains how to implement Scrum in just 10 easy steps from getting your backlog in order to tracking progress through burn charts, and more… Thanks goes out to Kelly Waters, from All About Agile, who writes:
When I first encountered agile development, I found it hard to understand. Okay, I might not be the brightest person you’ve ever met! But I’m not stupid either, I think 
There’s a myriad of different approaches, principles, methods and terms, all of which are characterised as ‘Agile’. And from my perspective, all this ‘noise’ makes agile software development sound far harder, far more scientific, and far more confusing than it really needs to be.
Read More…
Toyota Motor Corporation is famed for its ability to relentlessly improve operational performance. Central to this ability is the training of engineers, supervisors and managers in a structured problem-solving approach that uses a tool called the A3 Problem-Solving Report – that facilitates and improves knowledge sharing and collaboration.
The term “A3″ derives from the paper size used for the report, which is the metric equivalent to 11″ x 17″ (or B-sized) paper. Toyota actually uses several styles of A3 reports–for solving problems, for reporting project status, and for proposing policy changes–each having its own “storyline.”
The A3 Report is one of the most powerful tools in the lean toolset. Although it looks pretty simple, it is one of the most effective means of pulling together many of the tools used in problem solving and reporting. You can’t go wrong by learning how to use this tool and then implementing it within your organization.
For me, going from a non-agile development methodology to an agile one should have been simple. I had read the articles, attended the seminars, and knew the theory. However, what I did not have was a basic template for project tracking throughout an iteration. This article provides that template with the burn down chart shown below being the end goal. The only tool we need is a spreadsheet.*
