InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Q&A with Mike Burrows about the book Kanban from the Inside
In the book Kanban from the Inside Mike Burrows describes the Kanban Method, explores various models that can be using with Kanban and provides a process for implementing Kanban in organizations. InfoQ interviewed Mike about Kanban’s values, flow and classes of service, combining Kanban with Agile or Lean Startup and implementing Kanban in organizations.
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More Than LeSS
While the agile community has come up with refreshingly new approaches to scale agile methods, these models still seem to fall short in addressing the organizational complexity around large projects. This article provides a holistic approach to scaling Scrum. It is based on LeSS, amending it to better face the challenges of large projects.
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Q&A on Kanban in Action
The book Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sundén is a practical introduction for using kanban to manage work. It provides ideas for applying kanban to visualize work and track progress, to limit work in process, and on how to use metrics for improvement. It also provides games and exercises to learn the kanban principles.
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Q&A with Nadja Macht on Innovation, Flow and Continuous Improvement
Retrospectives help teams to learn from their experiences and improve continuously. In this interview Nadja Macht, Flow Manager and Coach at Jimdo, talks about how to balance flow and slack time in teams, doing visual management with Kanban boards and deploying agile retrospectives for continuous improvement.
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Q&A and Book Review of Scrum For The Rest of Us
Can you use Scrum outside software development? Brian Rabon wrote the book Scrum for the rest of us, a distilled guide that describes the essence of Scrum. This book explains Scrum without using information technology jargon which makes it suitable for all kinds of teams that want to use the Scrum method for managing their projects.
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Book Review and Q&A of Strength-based Lean Six Sigma
The book Strength-based Lean Six Sigma: Building Positive and Engaging Business Improvement by David Shaked supports applying strength-based change approaches with lean thinking and Six Sigma. InfoQ interviewed David about applying strength-based techniques like appreciative inquiry, solution focused, positive deviance and 5-why's with Lean Six Sigma, and measuring performance in organizations.
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Kanban on Track - Evolutionary Change Management at the Swiss Railways
Swiss Railways (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, SBB) employed Kanban to transform a department from disappointing performance to predictable efficiency through a series of incremental improvements. The evolutionary nature of Kanban gained traction with early quick wins and resulted in better management and greater responsiveness to change. This is a brief report of their two year journey.
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Culture is the True North - Scaling at Jimdo
A lot of the pain that large and medium-sized organizations are facing boils down to scaling. It is not difficult to have 5-10 people working together in one room. However, as your business becomes more successful and your hiring increases, you will start to see problems. At Jimdo, the approach to scaling relies on three major factors: culture, communication, and kaizen.
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Untangling the Enterprise With Continuous Delivery
John Kordyback explains why you should and how you can introduce Continuous Delivery into a typical enterprise, where dozens of systems adopted over the years generate massive complexity. Learn how value-stream mapping and Lean Startup thinking help to create a deployment process which serves as a solid foundation for further improvements on the whole software change lifecycle.
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Bug Fixing Vs. Problem Solving - From Agile to Lean
Lean has proved to be instrumental in moving beyond Agile to set up a practice of continuous improvement with direct effects on team performance and engagement. Making a clear distinction between bugs and problems has proved to be instrumental in this improvement.
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3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT: Sustaining Kanban in the Enterprise
This second article in the “3 years of Kanban at Sandvik IT” series focuses on the lessons that the System Development Office learned when sustaining the Kanban method during this 4 years journey. Presented are four qualities that Sandvik IT identified as key when setting-up relevant, and long-term, kanban systems in the enterprise: Stickiness, Clarity, Curiosity and Influence.
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The Kanban Survivability Agenda
This third and last article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model explores the survivability agenda. The values associated with this agenda are understanding, agreement, and respect; these say much about the philosophy that underlies Kanban, the humane, start with what you do now approach to change.