I've got this in my head and want to write it down. I'm still tweaking it, and would like feedback.

Criteria for Innovative Success:

• 1a) A Shared Vision of Success
• 1b) Willingness to drive towards that Vision
• 2) Reflective Problem Solving Staff

A Shared Vision is, well, shared. Everyone involved should be able to articulate it, write/draw it on a single white board.

I split 1) into two parts, or more specifically added the second part. I think that just having a vision isn't sufficient, the will to see it through and cut away what's not helpful is critical. I suppose the metaphor for 1b) would be chipping marble away to make a sculpture.

"Reflective Problem Solving" is a phrase I got from "Managing to Learn" by John Shook. I've got more to say about this book and will review it when I can, but having a team of people who refectively problem solve is very different than a team that does what it's told.

In my experience at the Lean Kanban conference I concluded that a Kanban board with WIP limits is a "concrete reflective tool". I'm now on the hunt for "concrete reflective" tools and ideas, with a strong belief that such tools will be adopted by more teams than abstract or prescriptive tools.

Update: The presentation went well, lots of good questions and conversation.

Link to the slides: http://gistlabs.com/john/pubs/2009/05/AJUG/


I'm presenting at the Austin Java Users Group tonight, on Kanban.

The slides will get posted there and on my company website, http://gistlabs.com, shortly.

I'm presenting at the Austin Java Users Group tonight, on Kanban.

The slides will get posted there and on my company website, http://gistlabs.com, shortly.

Last week one of my clients and I set up a Kanban board for the team. We did it as a physical board, and we're backing each card with an issue in a tracker.

We plan to use the issue tracker for these purposes:

• generate a Cumulative Flow Diagram (perhaps scripting an export to CSV or Excel)
• searchable index of activity
• release management tracking
• conversation (comments, emails, checkins) for details larger than a notecard
  

Here's what the board looks like:
Some details (that are hard to read):

• A Prioritized Queue on the left, highest priority on top
• Three workflow/VSM steps: InProgress, Review, Deployment
• Review is for developer peer review, and Staging (on QA for general review)
• Deployment Ready is available for production deployment, Deployed is recently deployed.
• Three swimlanes: two for development activities, one for IT operations support.
  

This is the current prototype for the cards:
Some of the tools that we use include sticky post-it notes and Stikky Clips. (Note: We found the Stikky Clips at a teacher supply store, not a big office supply store.)

Posted up on the Agile Executive Blog.

See the whole post here: http://theagileexecutive.com/2009/05/11/john-heintz-on-the-lean-kanban-2009-conference/