8 February 2013
The Kanban Drama (a summary)
For those of you who don’t have time to follow along with every twist and turn in the ongoing struggle between Kanban connoisseurs and the rest of the software development world in general I would like to take this opportunity to summarize my impressions of what has happened over the last five years. It takes the shape of a short play. It’s a summary so I have taken the liberty of slightly shortening and abstracting history. Only slightly. Enjoy!
22 October 2010
Kathrine and the Waves of Foreign Applications
– Welcome to this month’s public progress meeting on the latest FSA development!
Everybody in the room, about thirty people, slowly quieted down as Kathrine, the product leader, opened the meeting. Kathrine turned 38 years old on this day and had been working for the Eastern College of Business for five years now. She was generally regarded as the expert on foreign-country students and quite passionate about them too.
Faced with a horrible situation of fewer applications and employee burn-outs, management had given Kathrine free hands to “fix things”, as they had put it. And she had come through for them. She was the driving force behind the remarkable developments within the organisational processes handling applications from foreign students these past years. Although the number of foreign applications had increased 40% these last five years, the time from last day of application to the sending of the admittance decisions had gone from 3 months to 12 days. At the same time, employee satisfaction had gone from 45% to 87%.
Right next to Kathrine sat the other members of the development team. They looked calm and content. Peter, the testing specialist and Johanna, the lead programmer were chatting and giggling quietly. The audience was the usual crowd. They were mostly officers of the Student Applications department, but also a few newcomers, mostly managers looking nervously around. “Transparency rookies, better watch out”, Kathrine thought to herself.
30 September 2010
Highlights from Lean & Kanban 2010
The Lean & Kanban 2010 conference is arranged by AGILEminds and premiered this year in Antwerp, Belgium. It is one of these “Lean, Kanban, Systems thinking, etc” conferences that have popped up like mushrooms these latest years. Me and my colleagues thought the line-up looked fantastic so we decided to invade Antwerp – all three of us. These are my personal impressions and recollections.
