Projects need decisions. Unknown or unclear decisions might lead to undesirable actions. False decisions can even derail entire projects. Clearly, this is not the case for all decisions but for the important ones that give a project direction. Given the importance of decisions, some thought should be given to how decisions are reached. Surprisingly, many…
Large user stories (features) may pose a challenge even for teams that are quite efficient in producing high-quality releases consisting of small-to-medium size user stories. By large, we mean stories that take a considerable time for specification and/or development (more than a week for example) or have a high degree of complexity. Oftentimes, the same…
Blockers, stale tickets, bottlenecks need to be managed regularly to establish flow. An obvious choice for such a flow management to take place is a Daily Standup. Due to the popularity of Scrum, its approach to conducting Daily Scrums has been adopted by many teams for their Daily Standup even those not using Scrum. Is…
The Pros Limiting parallel work is a means to improve (among others) efficiency of work systems. In the Kanban context such limits are called WIP (Work in Progress or Work in Process) limits. In case of Team Kanban for instance they are set at the team level for workstations (workflow steps). It is in Team…
Introduction Continuously improving a project will necessitate making changes (among others) to the meeting structure(s). Oftentimes, “new” meetings such as Daily Standups or Retrospectives are met with resistance due to their perceived cost while established meeting such as weekly (aka Jour Fixe) meetings are considered to be indispensable. An objective view of the costs might…
Introduction In 2024, the success of IT projects is still the exception and not the rule. This holds true besides the presence of many solutions such as Scrum, XP, Kanban, SAFe etc. I would argue that the sole focus on solutions rather than the problem(s) and the underlying “forces” does not have the desired effect.…
Why is Success Still the Exception? In their 2023 Harvard Business Review article „How AI Will Transform Project Management“ [1] authors Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez and Ricardo Viana Vargas state “Every year, approximately $48 trillion are invested in projects. Yet according to the Standish Group, only 35% of projects are considered successful. The wasted resources and unrealized…
What are the essential ingredients for “turning the ship around”? How can a struggling team be transformed to a winning one? The blog series starts with a look from a higher level. Preface We have been in the business of improving the performance of projects of various sizes for the past 18 years. For the…
On June 6 2020, the German newspaper FAZ quotes R+V CEO Dr. Norbert Rollinger as follows: „The electronic signature has long been a nuisance for us. It is the prerequisite for digital insurance contracts. We have just achieved a breakthrough at R + V.“ We enabled the team to „turn the ship around“. A new…
I attended a Kanban workshop in Frankfurt, Germany in the fall of 2018. It was early in the morning, the conference room located in one of the hotel high-rises was not yet oxygen-deprived, coffee had been excellent and the group appeared lively. We were ready and eager to absorb Kanban knowledge.It was within the first…