This article covers a few ways in which discovery and delivery of work on a Kanban Board can be managed.

This article explores the different classes of service in Kanban and the Kanban Guide view on whether you should use different classes of service.

In most situations, blocked items are included in the work-in-progress limit, and only in edge case situations would you have a situation where you would exclude blocked items from work-in-progress (eg, we made all the phone calls, we shook all the trees, we’re thinking of canceling one work item and so we put traffic cones around it and we allow another item in.)

It is essentially re-wording an assumption or set of assumptions in a way that is put more like a question, or something that needs to be tested, eg. we believe this particular set of assumptions to be true, and we will know if we are right if X happens.

They’re very similar. I think the key difference really would be: the leader leads the way in terms of direction and then creates the space where that might happen. A leader is understanding that it is not just about delivery, that two-thirds of things are rarely or never used and so maybe we should be trying to have a heat-seeking missile to find the value in the market and maybe use cheap experiments so we do not lose our short and massive bets.

Assuming a decent Scrum team has a definition of done, one which the team respects (because if they respect it, they can then have some hope of continually improving it), how long does it take them to deliver a done increment?

In my opinion, the section on the definition of workflow in the Kanban Guide is probably the most important section. If you don’t understand your definition of workflow, many other things don’t work that well in the Kanban Guide as a result. If you don’t get that part, it’ll be difficult to really make progress.

What is release planning? When is it done? How do we manage stakeholder expectations and answer the infamous "when will it be done" question? How do we forecast? What numbers and methods can we use to forecast more accurately?

I often get asked this question. You can, but it does not mean you should. Let me explain why.

If you have people in product development or product management, in Scrum for example, if you have a Product owner who’s supposed to be on the hook for maximizing value … what is the productO

What is throughput, the role of Product Backlog items in ascertaining throughput and how do we measure throughput.

Often people confuse and conflate opinions from experts inside the building with evidence, and it's not evidence.

Why giving your people the time and space to learn and improve is important.

Scrum could be used in all sorts of domains, but I would not be so arrogant to tell you it can be used in any domain. It has been used and you can try it in pretty much any domain, but there would be one constraint holding back Scrum or holding back your ability to do Scrum: if you cannot deliver a done increment within 30 days.

What if I told you there is one 1 question you can ask to figure out where you are in the product life cycle? Moreover, what if I told you figuring out where you are can tell you the kind of complexities you can expect to deal with?

Are you a product owner? Do you need some coping strategies? Here are two tried and tested strategies. First, become a developer and use the notion of a product owner helper from large scale scrum. Secondly, have a speak now or forever hold your silence meeting.

What are the different categories of product owner? This episode goes outlines all the different types of product owners as well as the characteristics/pros and cons of each by considering them against the definition of a product and how you may deliver value. Join me as I also bust a common myth: product management being taught at Product Ownership classes.

What is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)? LeSS is a de-scaling framework. Also referred to sometimes as a scaling framework, but it's really aimed at simplification and it's designed for product development. This article explores what large scale scrum is about as well as its events. https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility - social and podcast links https://linkpop.com/orderlydisruption - order training from right here

Can Scrum be used outside software development? Absolutely.

When will Scrum die? Some people would say it's already dying. There's so much inauthentic, Scrum being done, unprofessional, Scrum being done in the world. Whereas Scrum is part of what I call water Scrum fall, where it's put within a predictive deterministic system. We're predicting when work will be finished. When actually we’ve got so much work that where we don't know, what we don't know, that's really unauthentic. I see in those situations where the concept of done isn't even a concept there They think that done means we met the acceptance criteria when actually it's almost like the checklist for how we do things around here, the technical standards and the product quality standards, international standards, for example, that we might need to comply with.

What is the difference? By analyzing what should a Scrum Master be doing and what would a leader do, we can understand that there is not much difference. Why do I think leaders make great Scrum Masters? Read on.

Why is our definition of done so long? I don’t like to call the definition of done the checklist for how we do things around here. I used to say that because you might be including every single little thing in your process when you do that, but does it have the essential elements of how do we know that this work is done? So why is our definition of done so long? In some cases, actually, it’s not long at all. My most common experience is that when I ask people what’s in their definition of done they say we met the acceptance criteria. There’s a lot more to done than just meeting the acceptance criteria. This typically happens when there’s a kind of a traditional approach to delivery and scrum has been wrapped inside that approach. I often call it water scrum fall and in waterfall, it’s very professional, it’s very good but it doesn’t have a thing called a definition of done. So this concept is alien to waterfall.

How do I measure value for a major IT infrastructure piece of work? How do I measure value? Before I even get into, how do I measure value? What is value? A lot of people struggle with this. I wrote an article about this here, what is value really? I think one of the reasons why the world is in the way it is, is because we over-indexed on a couple of meanings for that.

Is it the Product Owner? The Developers? The Scrum Master?

Did you know that there are 17 United Nation, sustainable development goals. Did you know that when you’re measuring value, you can consider societal value as part of that. And that could include consideration for those 17 United Nation sustainable development goals. Now those 17 United Nation sustainable development goals, they do compete against each other.

Cycle time is where we’re measuring how long a work item takes to get from one part of our workflow to another part of our workflow.

How can we use Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting to set expectations in scrum?

Who writes acceptance criteria?. Should you even have acceptance criteria? It's a loaded question, because it's assuming that we're using user stories. And in user stories typically you might say in order to deliver a particular type of value, some particular persona wants or needs something in order to do so, and then you typically list off your acceptance criteria.

But when you have scrum, for example, you need to deliver an increment every single sprint and that increment needs to be done. So the team needs to have a thing called a Definition of Done and done does not mean met the acceptance criteria. Doesn’t just mean that, there should be other considerations as well. So there’s the definition of done. I don’t want to really call it the checklist for how we do things around here, because that might be a bit too process-oriented and maybe a bit too detailed. There’s a nice balance between trust and being clear what we need to do, but as such the team would know what they need to do for something to be called on at the end of the sprint so they can show something at the end of the sprint. That’s all fine. But what do the developers do in the last week of the sprint? It feels like a loaded question because the assumption that I’m reading from the question is that the developers, in your case, write the code, and then they hand it off to some people who do some testing.

How can you scale in Scrum and what scaling patterns can you use?

Today I want to tell you a little bit of a story about a festival in England. You know what the English summertime is like. We went to a thing called Pub in the Park in Marlow, and it was raining. It rained really heavily. And we were wondering what to eat and we saw these different stalls and we were disappointed with the food we were getting. I was waiting a long time for my pizza, but I noticed something that they weren’t overloading themselves because they were taking their time taking the orders. They slowed down the arrival rate of orders coming to the pizza stall. So it meant, there was really like a very good flow, that The people were working completely in tandem. I could see there was a constraint there on the pizza oven. They probably could have done with two pizza ovens and that person seemed to be under a lot of pressure. But they didn’t take on any more work than they had the capability to take on. They were fully utilized but they first optimized their flow. It was like a really tiny portion for a lot of money. And so we said, let’s get some pizza. And we went to a pizza stall and there was a big, long queue. I asked my family to go in under a tent and I just had an umbrella, luckily, and I had rain gear and I waited in the queue and I was waiting for quite a while.

I learn all the time, and 2021 taught me a lot. Based on those lessons, I’d like to share an update on what organizational agility means to me in 2022. I hope you find it useful for what it does and does not mean for you.

Scrum with Kanban includes a definition of workflow, four practices, and four measures. The first practice is visualization of the workflow. The visualization of that workflow is essentially the Kanban board. 

This part I of a three-part series will focus on goals. We’ll examine how the goals set out in the EBM guide correspond to the Scrum Guide and some tools and formats for setting workable goals. Part II will focus on experimentation, and Part III will focus on measurement.

There are loads of blog posts, articles and podcasts about agile - what it should be, what it should do, how it should look? The problem is that a lot of what’s out there is hypothetical and not based on field experience.

The term organizational agility is everywhere these days, but what does it really mean? Can we even define it at all? Deepen your understanding of the manifesto and why it is essential to implementing healthy agile that delivers meaningful value.

Have you ever noticed people keep talking about things, but they've not aligned with what their words mean? I have seen agility measured as the number of "agile teams" and the "number of training attendees" more often than I like to admit.

The following are the changes that struck me the most in the 2020 Scrum Guide...

This blog post talks about the addition of Commitments to each Artifact in the updated Scrum Guide.

Executives: there are many reasons for agility. You already know this.

Somewhere between the CEO and 1st line management level, "you do Scrum, just get it done, how much money you need, and what kind of people you need."  "It's just another framework." Salespeople were saying, "you're doing Scrum magic and making it faster." Sometimes people don't want to change.

Many thanks to attendees at my PAL-E workshop in London on 26-27 October who reviewed & debugged my change story for "what is organizational agility?"

Just to set the scene, I haven’t figured this out yet. I can tell you my story, in all its ugliness. It’s based on a real story, but it’s changed significantly from reality to protect the innocent. I hope you still find my account useful.

I often wonder about the Trustpilot reviews straight after a workshop. Did I entertain? Did I perform? Were attendees satisfied? Are attendees inspired? It matters. I just think it matters more if the workshop made a difference to the work lives of attendees. I can't take credit. The client does the hard yards.

For executives and for change agents who deal with executives in large contexts ...

An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization.