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Blogs and Articles

14 Mar 2011

Finding Answers to Project Management Questions

Sometimes, despite all your background reading, gutting it out and trying it, you can't figure out why something doesn't work. Or you can't figure out how to move forward. There's an excellent site out there for all Project Managers: PM Stack Exchange. If you're not familiar with it, ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: Agile , stackexchange , scrum , kanban
10 Jan 2011

Running with Kanban: measuring progress

Despite not being a traditionally techy-type, I do appreciate a nice chart. Though much-derided Excel's charting functions can help serve up a picture that informs so much more concisely and inarguably than a table of data that I'll defer to them quite often. It's no fun wading ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: kanban , Iron Speed
24 Dec 2010

Merry Christmas!

We've packed up for a well-deserved break now, so here's a short message to say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our customers! See you all back on the blog in 2011.

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Posted by: Gary Fenn
20 Dec 2010

Running with Kanban: feedback

Just one day into Kanban, on it's first Scrum, something great happened. The team offered feedback on how it could be improved. As well as an "In Testing" column, they wanted to add a "Peer Review" column to give each other a chance to look over each ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: kanban , Iron Speed
13 Dec 2010

Running with Kanban: rolling it out

With boards designed, limits set and cards designed, it was time to put it out in the wild. One afternoon, I drew some lines on a spare whiteboard in full view of the team and laid the board out. When it was complete, I talked them through ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: kanban
10 Dec 2010

Running with Kanban: setting rules

One clear element that comes recommended with Kanban is to define a simple set of rules adjacent to the board so that everyone can see them. I scratched my head, drunk some coffee and came up with 5 simple rules that we could employ in conjunction with ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: kanban
07 Dec 2010

Running with Kanban: designing the cards

Now the board was done, the limits were set: now for the task cards themselves. In our case granularity was already at a good level: the task itself is often small in nature and at an acceptable size. Those more complex questions can get split out as ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: kanban
06 Dec 2010

Running with Kanban: setting limits

One of the core principles of Kanban is limiting WIP: that is, determing how much 'work' should be carried out concurrently. This was nowhere near as straightforward as I thought it might be. I definitely wanted to set a limit on the backlog, as the real backlog ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: kanban
03 Dec 2010

Running with Kanban: designing the board

After settling on Kanban as a suitable method for handling support tasks, the hard part came... implementing it. I read through dozens of blogs, scanned many crib sheets and other information trying to ascertain a good starting point. It seems the first thing to do is design ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: scrum , kanban
29 Nov 2010

Spreadsheets and Databases Wherever You Need Them

How many times have you seen this message? It's frustrating when you're trying to collaboratively work on a project or database using the same spreadsheet and you can't make changes until the person sitting opposite you has finished working with it. That is, if they haven't gone ...

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Posted by: Gary Fenn

Tags: spreadsheet

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