In this article Vikas Agarwal explains in detail common mistakes in designing a Kanban board and how to avoid them. We appreciate the community of our Kanban Maturity Model Contributors for the interesting and useful content. If you have implemented Kanban but do not know if it has improved business agility and predictability, read this article. You could have created a “status” board, not a “Kanban” Board. The reason for this is that implementing the correct Kanban board can be complicated due to our reliance on project management tools. In a way, these tools act as a blindfold. Sometimes, o ..read more

We believe that exploring Kanban together with your team increases the efficiency of your Kanban implementation. That is why we would like to encourage more teams to do so and we're ready to support them on their journey. Workshop for existing KMM Plus Corporate Subscribers: 22nd of May 4 PM CET. Registration deadline: 16th of May Workshop for NEW KMM Plus Corporate Subscribers: 15th of June 4 PM CEST. Sign-up and Registration deadline: 9th of June About the Workshop: "I don't like it!" How can we use dissatisfaction to run a successful change? Identify and use three evolutionary change elem ..read more

Getting more revenue while reducing cost: who doesn’t want that? During the last few decades, we’ve started to see a shift in the market: up to the 90s, improving corporate processes and doing more with less was the name of the game. Steady, linear growth was the recipe for business success. However, as the 2000s rolled in, something changed: big fish are no longer able to simply eat smaller or faster fish, and the startup phenomenon rendered linear growth outdated. Exponentiality was the new deal. Part of the startup magic is about gauging new needs, learning, and adapting fast. This is poss ..read more

Explore the dependency management example in Kanban with an illustrative Kanban implementation in an advertising agency. Lots of professionals struggle with managing dependencies. We can schedule something and often it turns out that it takes longer than expected because of some dependency that caused the delay. And we wish we had scheduled this task for earlier. Such cases make people anxious because they want to look professional in their work, make good-quality decisions with confidence, and deliver on time. Kanban offers a variety of solutions to facilitate the work with dependencies. You ..read more

Don Reinertsen's foreword to the 1st Edition of the Kanban Maturity Model (KMM) or why should you explore the KMM. This text was written by Don Reinertsen back in 2010 as a foreword to the first edition of the KMM book. Many years have passed since then, and the second edition of the KMM is already available. With time, much of what Don mentioned has since become what we now call "the myths of Kanban". We are publishing this foreword separately now to remind you why you should familiarize yourself with KMM and how it helps your agile initiatives. "I always pay attention to David Anderson’s wo ..read more

With more than a decade of observations and experience from around the world and across a broad spectrum of industries, two patterns of failure, or failure modes, have emerged with the implementation of the  Kanban Method: the false summit plateau and overreaching. False Summit Plateau The false summit plateau comes from the arrogance of believing that since an organization has adopted Kanban already, they’ve already experienced all of its benefits. Typically, we hear a reaction of “We’ve done  Kanban! It helped us […].” Usually from a shop-floor, bottom-up  initiative, they li ..read more

Dear Community! We are happy to observe the growth in the Kanban Maturity Model and the KMM Plus popularity. We also recognize that the knowledge about the Kanban Method could be spread even more if it is available in your native language. Hence, we decided to allow the global network to translate the KMM content. This article will guide you step by step on how you can proceed with the translation if you want to participate in this effort and share your work with others. Let’s get started! Step 1 Go to https://kmm.plus/en/and choose your preferred language from the list: Step 2 Click on the ..read more

A Lesson on Sociology Based on Justin Bieber Recently,  we added a new Kanban Maturity Model poster, the Social Entropy poster.  Social entropy is one of the many outlined concepts in the Leadership Maturity Model by David Anderson.   It refers to group cohesiveness. A large affinity group with a shared identity and purpose, acting with congruence and moving with alignment is low entropy. A group of individuals with no affinity to each other acting on their own without congruence or alignment is high entropy. In the poster, some might notice what appears to be a typo. The poste ..read more

In the first half of 2022, we introduced updates to the Practice Map Poster clustering all transition sub-level practices with consolidation practices. You can read more about those changes in the article KMM 1.3 updates to the Practice poster. To keep the changes consistent through all KMM-related assets, we also decided to update the Managed Evolution Poster. The list of changes covers: Aggregating  all transition sub-levels with lower-level maturity consolidation  practices (e.g., ML1 Transition practices are grouped together with ML0  Consolidation practices at Maturity Le ..read more

The first KMM Plus Insider Community event took place online on the 30th of June 2022. The Q&A session with Kanban Coach and Trainer Anna Radzikowska gathered the most active KMM Plus subscribers from all over the world. During the session, Anna responded to the questions that the KMM Plus team received from their Insiders beforehand as well as the most popular Kanban questions that are frequently asked by the Kanban practitioners. Participants also got a chance to ask their own questions on the way and participate in an open discussion with the present Kanban experts. Watch the recording ..read more