Recent Posts
- Choosing the right portfolio of projects, and setting next year’s revenue targets.
- Planning and hiring staff for the future, and setting next year’s cost targets.
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All Estimation is Waste – Rubbish!
7 Feb 2012Guest post: Troy Magennis of Focused Objective
As long-time IT professionals ourselves, we at LeanKit understand the pain of being asked for detailed estimates about things we’ve never done and may never do. An awful lot of time gets wasted building detailed plans that end up bearing no relation to reality. The idea of making people sit through boring status meetings to give percent-complete estimates for mostly irrelevant project plan line items makes us kind of ill. So, we whole-heartedly support the drive in the Lean-Agile world to move away from detailed plans and estimates at the tactical level. We think the capability metrics you can get from a well designed Kanban system are much more useful for short-term forecasting. Hint, hint.
But …
Executives making investment decisions need some sense of where a big project might head before they can responsibly give the green light to start buying equipment and licenses, hiring staff, in some cases leasing buildings, etc. A senior IT-exec friend of ours described his business peers asking the question “What cliff are you driving us toward?” At this level, estimating is critically necessary.
Our friend Troy Magennis is of the same mind. Troy is a long time associate of David Anderson, Dan Vacanti, and other key folks in the Kanban movement. Present at the creation you might say. He was a senior technical leader for Travelocity – a very big and admirably Agile corporate software development company. He’s now written a very interesting book about the need for effective forecasting to support Agile at Scale. And he’s building some awesome executive estimating tools that we are eagerly anticipating.
His essay is a must-read for Agilists who are serious about growing the movement.
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Agilists must accept the need for revenue and budget forecasts to be taken seriously
It is easy to join the chorus of opinion that software project estimation is waste and must be eliminated. Whilst I can understand the objections to spending valuable time preparing and rationalizing a set of estimates for ill-defined features or projects, this posting explains the counter-points – why estimation is necessary, and why it is in your best interest to participate.
I’m not defending the obvious waste of being asked to estimate work that is going to proceed regardless of the time and cost taken to complete; there is little rational reason to waste time putting together these estimates. I am saying that most companies will require some form of estimates from IT in order to grow and be competitive. This post considers two basic causes for companies to require estimation –
Service Outage Report
In: Uncategorized
1 Feb 2012Early this morning, we started experiencing extremely slow response times on our LeanKit websites and e-mails. After determining that our servers and system were themselves working properly, we isolated the issue to our domain registrar GoDaddy. Hackers had re-routed some of our web addresses to a site protesting proposed intellectual property legislation called SOPA. We are not in favor of SOPA in any way. We believe GoDaddy was the real target of the attack and we (and you) were just victims.
We’ve corrected the issue and reported it to GoDaddy and legal authorities. As of now all services are working normally although some sporadic issues are possible as changes to domain names can take time to spread through the Internet.
At no time were LeanKit Kanban servers or data accessed or compromised by hackers. They also did not reach our primary domain servers at PEER1 Networks. They simply accessed our Name Registrar at GoDaddy, reset the name servers to the GoDaddy defaults, and forwarded the domains to their own webpage.
The LeanKitKanban.com domain itself was not compromised. Some resources used by LeanKitKanban, however, reside on the LeanKitTools.com and LeanKit.com domains, and these domains were redirected. This is why you would not have seen the hacker site when you tried to access LeanKitKanban this morning, but behind the scenes many of the services used by the application were unavailable because of the redirect.
We sincerely apologize for any problems this outage may have caused you.
The LeanKit Team
Using Kanban in the Classroom
In: Uncategorized
23 Jan 2012Guest post: Patty Beidleman, Elementary Educator
Many of you may know our next guest blogger, Patty Beidleman, from Twitter where she she’s well known in Lean / Kanban community as @topsurf. She’s been a friend and inspiration for us at LeanKit since the early, early days of the company. We’ve been impressed by her passion for improving education through technology and for innovation with Personal Kanban – using both physical and electronic Kanban. She is actively working to export ideas from the IT Lean / Agile world into the education community. And we’ve been proud to help her.
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I have been using Personal Kanban successfully for more than two years now. I love the simplicity, and the way it flows and changes with you. What I love most about Personal Kanban is that anyone in any situation can use it to be more productive, effective and efficient in his or her work, whether you are a stay-at-home mom or the CEO of a company. Here are just a few of the ways I have used Personal Kanban:
Service Downtime Complete
In: Uncategorized
21 Jan 2012As of 6:10 PM US Central Standard Time (GMT -6) LeanKit has completed our migration of the Kanban system to our new hosting environment in Reston, VA. All manual and automated testing and monitoring indicate that full service has been restored. We already see normal usage by a number of business and personal kanban customers. We see no indication of issues from our global monitoring sites, but it does sometimes take longer for Internet routing changes (DNS) to reach some corners of the globe. We are confident that this will be totally complete by Sunday, and certainly by normal business hours Monday.
Our new hosting environment will allow us to better support our rapidly growing customer base, and help us better prevent and respond to service outages like we experienced Tuesday. We know that continuous up-time for SaaS systems like LeanKit is critical for our customers to depend on them.
If you see any issues or performance degradation, please don’t hesitate to e-mail us at support@leankitkanban.com or visit http://support.leankitkanban.com for information or to log a support ticket.
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The LeanKit Team
Outage Report and Planned Downtime
In: Uncategorized
17 Jan 2012for Saturday, January 21
Today, January 17, from 2:27PM to 2:53PM CST (GMT-6), the LeanKitKanban application was unavailable for a total of 26 minutes. Our production database server became unresponsive and had to be physically rebooted by the network engineers at our hosting provider, PEER1 Networks in Los Angeles. The support staff at PEER1 has indicated that they suspect an underlying hardware failure may be the cause, but little information is available to troubleshoot further.
Over the past few months, we’ve built out and tested a new production environment for LeanKitKanban at a PEER1 data center in Herndon, VA. This new environment includes additional capacity, load balancing and fault tolerance features. This was done as part of normal capacity planning as the number of customers using LeanKitKanban is rapidly growing.
Since we have a somewhat mysterious “hardware problem” at our existing production site, we have decided to expedite the move to our new production datacenter in Herndon, VA. Though we normally like to give at least 7 days notice of any downtime, we will make an exception in this case, and schedule downtime for this Saturday, January 21.
The downtime window will be from 3PM to 7PM CST (GMT-6) this Saturday, January 21.
We apologize for the interruption today, and thank you for your patience.
Chris Hefley
CEO, LeanKit
Using Kanban to improve audit management
In: Kanban Method
10 Jan 2012Guest post: Yuval Yeret of Agile Sparks
One of our New Year’s resolutions at LeanKit is to do a better job of sharing ideas for effectively using Kanban with our customers. We pick up some pretty good ideas from working with customers, and we promise that we’ll be working some of those into blog posts from time to time. We are also blessed with a lot of really smart friends in the Lean/Agile community, a number of whom have agreed to share their wisdom with us and you as guest bloggers.
The first of these guest posts is from Yuval Yeret of Agile Sparks. We’ve known Yuval for several years now and both respect and really like him. He’s a talented Kanban trainer and consultant and a frequent speaker on the Lean/Agile conference circuit. You should definitely check-out his blog yuvalyeret.com and his presentations on Slideshare.
Enjoy!
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Background
Every time we at AgileSparks get a chance to go out of our comfort zone of technology delivery organizations, it excites us. We believe that the thinking, principles and practices we use for technology delivery are very relevant in other knowledge-intensive domains as well, and keep looking for opportunities to test that belief. Our work with technology delivery organizations exposes us to other supporting activities in organizations. I recently wrote on my blog about an HR group that we worked with (and I have more updates about that group that I need to write about…). This time I want to talk about another type of activity – Audit.
An Audit group within an organization is charged with auditing systems and processes mainly as part of Risk Management. Let’s look at what Agile/Kanban might mean in this context.
Do we need training to “do” Kanban?
In: Kanban Method
3 Jan 2012The benefits of professional Lean coaching
When we tell people about our company, we’re often asked whether customers need training to use LeanKit or to “do” Kanban. The short answer is no. Kanban as a tool is about as simple as it gets: sticky notes, whiteboard, markers, go. And we’ve tried to build LeanKit to be as simple to use as physical Kanban – in some ways a lot easier when it comes to evolving and templating board design, capturing metrics, and generating graphics. We’re constantly thinking about how to improve the experience. In fact, we are working hard right now on an overhaul of our UI to make the user experience even better.
The Kanban method is also simple at first glance. Authors like David Anderson, Jim Benson, and Alan Shalloway, and others have written quite good books to explain it. Check-out the Reading section of our page navigation for a list of resources. You definitely should read these books. And, having read them, you absolutely can “do” Kanban on your own. Many of our customers have done so with great success.
But, like anything there’s the basics and then there’s expertise. We advise people to start by quickly making a simple model of their team’s current workflow – not to try to reengineer their process or map out every permutation. Just get started because the benefits of having any kind of board are so large that you want to get them right away. You can certainly do this on your own. But this initial board design is a starting point.
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