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Press release: LeanKit announces integration partnership with Focused Objective
In: Uncategorized
15 May 2012Integration offers dramatically improved forecasting and quantitative analysis for Kanban teams
LeanKit, recognized as the leader in electronic Lean/Kanban software, and Focused Objective, makers of the most powerful risk management solution for Lean-Agile management, today announce a partnership to provide customers with an integrated product offering. The combined solution will bring industry leading quantitative analysis to LeanKit’s and Focused Objective’s customer base in an easy to use and immediately available way. This analysis includes forecasting project delivery dates, pinpointing what factors such as staffing, quality, scope change, etc. are having the greatest impact on delivery dates, and the ability to find what staff skill additions will have the most impact.
“The ability to answer tough questions relating to date, cost, staff and risk forecasts, both before and during a software development project is a capability we want all Lean and Agile teams to have at their fingertips”, according to Troy Magennis, founder and CTO of Focused Objective. “By allowing customers to import and work from the leading Kanban tool vendor, LeanKit, we remove any barrier to entry and offer users an accelerated timeline to seeing incredible results from our simulation and modeling technology.”
“The accuracy and quality of the data available from a Kanban system is far superior to what has been available to management in the past. Traditional project management systems collect data based on estimates and averages, and are inherently flawed, explained Chris Hefley, founder and CEO of LeanKit. “This integration will take the high-quality data available from LeanKit and combine it with the revolutionary simulation and forecasting technology provided by Focused Objective, to provide managers and planners with the kind of accurate and reliable analysis that they need to make good decisions.”
The first visible outcome of this partnership is the immediate availability of an import tool that brings data from LeanKit into KanbanSim, Focused Objective’s desktop simulation tool for Lean teams. Magennis explains, “It is important that our customers aren’t forced to enter backlog data or plan multiple deliverables in more than one place. LeanKit does a fantastic job of making it easy to plan and organize a product story backlog, and our import wizard takes that data and incorporates it into our modeling language.”
About LeanKit
LeanKit is recognized by Lean community leaders and practitioners alike as the most flexible and powerful tool available for implementing the Kanban method. The company is also making a name for itself in the Lean community beyond software with ventures into construction, manufacturing, education, and more. Since its founding in 2009, LeanKit has grown rapidly to serve more than 60,000 users around the world at companies such as Spotify, Glaxo Smith Kline, NBC Universal, BBVA, Geico, Nokia, and the government of Ontario, Canada. Enterprise Kanban @ LeanKitKanban.com.
About Focused Objective
Focused Objective makes tools that effectively model Kanban and Scrum projects to get accurate forecasts of cost, delivery dates and staff requirements. Using a variety of proven quantitative techniques, Focused Objective’s modeling and simulation technology allows rapid what-if analysis to find options that minimize cost and delivery time, whilst maximizing revenue. Founded in 2011, Focused Objective offers a variety of products, notably – a rich modeling language (SimML), a desktop simulation product (KanbanSim and ScrumSim), and a simulation engine that can be incorporated into other products.
Additional Resources
LeanKit
Website: http://leankitkanban.com
Twitter: @LeanKitKanban
Video demos: http://leankitkanban.com/Home/ProductTour
Press contact: jon.terry@leankit.com
Focused Objective
Website: http://www.focusedobjective.com
Twitter: @AgileSimulation
Execute Overview Video: watch here
Press contact: troy.magennis@focusedobjective.com
Integration Extends Workflow Visualization and Lean Metrics Capabilities
VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools, and LeanKit, makers of the Lean software world’s most powerful Kanban tool, today announced the availability of their integrated solution providing sophisticated Kanban workflow visualization and Lean metrics capabilities. The solution enables organizations to meet the needs of advanced Kanban teams while continuing to consolidate all their agile projects in a single system for multi-level planning, cross-team visibility and rollup reporting across the entire portfolio.
VersionOne’s Kanban boards are highly effective for teams using lightweight Kanban workflow processes – such as those practicing Scrumban or Lean methods within iterations. VersionOne with LeanKit Kanban is designed to meet the needs of teams with more sophisticated Kanban needs, including the ability to build visual models of more complex processes and access to detailed Lean metrics and reporting to optimize their workflow.
VersionOne with LeanKit Kanban is ideal for enterprises that practice multiple agile methodologies and need more sophisticated Kanban functionality at the team level. It provides a single agile project management system giving customers the flexibility to adopt multiple development approaches at the team-level, while giving stakeholders visibility into project status across all agile and Lean teams.
“For those teams who have adopted an advanced level of Kanban in their organizations, VersionOne with LeanKit Kanban provides an integrated, scalable solution to optimize workflow and enterprise-wide visibility,” said VersionOne’s CEO and President Robert Holler. “We are excited to work with LeanKit, as they have the most advanced Kanban tool in the marketplace. LeanKit’s reputation for flexible, easy-to-use visual management capabilities is a natural fit for our agile lifecycle management solutions in agile and lean environments.”
“The rapid adoption of Kanban has already been nothing short of amazing as the agile community has come to recognize the simple power of Lean visualization and analytics. LeanKit has been proud to be part of that, providing tools that help even the biggest global organizations to adopt Lean and Kanban.” said LeanKit’s CEO Chris Hefley. “We look forward to working with VersionOne and their customers to bring LeanKit’s best-of-breed Kanban solution to an even wider audience.”
About VersionOne
VersionOne is recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile project management tools. By simplifying the planning and tracking of agile projects, we help teams deliver better software faster. Since 2002, companies such as Adobe, Boeing, bwin, Intuit, Lilly, Lockheed Martin, Oppenheimer, Qualcomm, Sabre and Siemens have turned to VersionOne. Today more than 50,000 teams around the world use VersionOne. Agile Made Easier @ VersionOne.com.
About LeanKit
LeanKit is recognized by Lean community leaders and practitioners alike as the most flexible and powerful tool available for implementing the Kanban method. The company is also making a name for itself in the Lean community beyond software with ventures into construction, manufacturing, education, and more. Since its founding in 2009, LeanKit has grown rapidly to serve more than 50,000 users around the world at companies such as Spotify, Glaxo Smith Kline, NBC Universal, BBVA, Geico, CBS Interactive, and the government of Ontario, Canada. Enterprise Kanban @ LeanKitKanban.com.
Additional Resources:
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Bringing Kanban to the Federal Market Space
19 Apr 2012As citizens and taxpayers, I’m sure we all like to see our governments working to become more efficient and effective. And here at LeanKit, we’re obviously pretty bought-in to the idea that applying Lean-Agile to an organization’s operations can bring dramatic productivity improvements. So, we’ve been excited this past year to see strong signs that people in the government sector are working hard to make Lean-Agile work for their, admittedly very large and very complex projects. We participated in the Agile DC conference last fall and the ADAPT group’s Agile in Defense conference this spring and now we’re looking forward to GLASScon in June. There are lots of great conversations about how to make government better from the practitioner level all the way up to senior federal executives.
Case in point is our friend Rich Kostro. Rich is a Georgetown classmate of Jon’s and a senior level consultant in the federal space, working most extensively at the moment with the FBI. Rich is working to bring Kanban to that organization and brings a great perspective to us all here about the gigantic opportunity, the very real challenges, and the practical steps we can take to move forward. Highly recommended!
Guest Blog – Rich Kostro of Advenio Strategies
The federal market space is ripe for the introduction of kanban best practices. According to the Federal IT Dashboard, last year the government spent $78.7 billion (yes, with a ‘B’) on IT projects, including investments in COTS, GOTS, upgrades and an army of consultants and contractors to glue it all together. These projects ranged in scope from the very smallest programs of only several thousand dollars to the mega, multi-agency initiatives, such as the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative and the implementation of the Federal CIO Council’s “Cloud First” Initiative. The size of this portfolio and increasing pressure on financial resources makes an opportunity for kanban enthusiasts who can offer the government increased efficiency.
The Kanban Method works for any value stream
One of the very best things about the work we do at LeanKit is the opportunity to see our product be used in many different ways. We talk with potential customers every day about how our tool might fit their needs. The conversation often starts with “We know your tool is mostly used in software development so I hope you won’t be upset if we think it might work for ….” We are, of course, delighted not upset. And, we find that, while the labels and scale may change from conversation to conversation, the fundamental ideas of Kanban hold true regardless.
It’s even more fun when we hear back from our customers about how they’ve taken their LeanKit implementation from idea to reality to success story. And the great thing about being a SaaS provider is how short the time can be between idea and success! In any case, we had the pleasure of hearing recently from a customer in Brazil, André Cymbalista, Industrial Director of Pavao Revestimento - which manufactures absolutely beautiful tiles. To be so graciously complimented by such skilled crafts people is an honor.
“We use LeanKit Kanban to integrate the commercial and industrial sides of our business process. It improves our day to day operations by confering visibility to what’s happening in the factory, which is located 150km from the company headquarters. Now everyone one knows which orders are on manufacturing, when stuff will be ready, and what will happen next. It has improved immensely our customer service, and it has increased productivity for industrial supervision staff. Now they have a clear channel to communicate progress.
We are planning to extend LeanKit Kanban functionality in the near future with a series of systems integration projects. First on the line is integration with our ERP system with the LKK API. When we get a new order, there will be a new card created automatically. When the order is completed and the invoice is issued in the ERP, the card is archived automatically.
We are also planning to integrate LKK further with our CRM with a view to provide customers with timely information about order shipment status and tracking.
The feature our staff loves most about LKK is that it looks good and it is fun to work with.”
LeanKit Kanban Outage Retrospective
In: Uncategorized
2 Apr 2012LeanKit Kanban Outage Report
Thursday March 22nd
8:00 AM CDT – 5:45PM CDT (GMT-5)
Background:
An outage of LeanKit Kanban on March 22nd resulted in approximately 9.5 hours of unscheduled downtime for our customers. For many of our customers, this occurred during peak business hours and caused hardships and difficulties far beyond what is acceptable from our point of view. At this point, we can offer apologies and assurances that we are taking corrective actions to prevent this type of outage from ever happening again.
What Caused the Outage:
At approximately 8:00 AM CDT (GMT-5), the hosting provider that we selected to host our infrastructure mistakenly reallocated the IP addresses for our private subnet. After that point, no network traffic was able to reach any of our infrastructure. This resulted in a complete loss of access to our systems and therefore limited the amount of diagnostic activity that we could perform. We immediately contacted our hosting provider and sent them all the troubleshooting information that we we able to compile. Our provider performed their diagnostic and corrective actions including the replacement major networking components. Unfortunately, despite numerous diagnostic attempts, they were unable to discover the root cause of the issue until late in the afternoon. After discovery of the problem, the issue was resolved quickly and our system connectivity was re-established.
Commitment – a novel on managing risk
In: Kanban Method
17 Mar 2012Last fall at Lean Kanban Benelux in Antwerp, Chris Matts and Olav Massen told us about a very cool idea for creating graphic novels to help people learn about Lean-Agile concepts. As big fans of business novels like Eli Goldratt’s “The Goal” we thought this was great. Several of us at LeanKit were big comic book fans when we were younger, so the combination of the two sounded both very useful and very fun. We were excited, interested in helping, and have periodically nagged them since then on Twitter.
Well, our wait is over (or almost)! We learned this week that they have worked with artist Chris Geary to write and illustrate “Commitment – a novel on managing risk.” The book explains their leading-edge ideas on real options in a way that should make them much more accessible to a wider audience.
We’ve already pitched in as sponsors to help bring the project to the point where they can start publishing. We would encourage other members of the Lean-Agile community to do the same. We think this will be a great teaching tool that all of us can use to help our customers reach better results in their organizations.
http://www.sponsume.com/project/commitment-novel-managing-project-risk
The LeanKit Team
We know – we geek out a lot about people using us for construction, or manufacturing, or logistics, or auto repair, or talent management or whatever. Our business at LeanKit really has spread quite a bit beyond our software development management roots by now. But, we still recognize that our core business (and our hearts and heritage) are in the IT department. And, within that broad area, some of the most successful Kanban implementations (of LeanKit or any other flavor) are IT operations groups.
Kanban is just a natural fit for Ops people who want to be Lean-Agile but for whom the idea of Scrum’s fixed iterations just makes no sense. Indeed, we’ve seen the increased speed of Scrum actually cause problems for Ops teams as they struggle to balance quick-moving competing demand. They get stuck as the punching bag in the Scrum of Scrums!
Today’s guest blogger, Dominica DeGrandis is one of the thought leaders in Kanban for Operations. She’s a long-time Ops person herself and a long-time associate of Kanban trailblazer David Anderson. Dominica speaks often on the Lean/Agile/Kanban conference circuit and offers Kanban training targeted at people in Ops. She also edits the Kanban Weekly Roundup at http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/, which we recommend you follow.
We’re thrilled to welcome Dominica to the blog!
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