Chris Hefley
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Chris Hefley

Chris Hefley is a co-founder of LeanKit. After years of coping with “broken” project management systems in software development, Chris helped build LeanKit as a way for teams to become more effective. He believes in building software and systems that make people’s lives better and transform their relationship with work. In 2011, he was nominated for the Lean Systems Society’s Brickell Key Award. Follow Chris on Twitter @indomitablehef.

How to Run Effective Standups and Retrospectives

Step three of The Kanban Roadmap: How to Get Started in 5 Steps As a systems-thinking methodology, Kanban calls for team members to take collective responsibility for team priorities. Rich conversations about the work are a must-have. They help the team discover bottlenecks, resolve issues, focus on flow, and continuously improve their process. To facilitate these...

What is Flow and Why it Matters

Flow means to “move along in a steady, continuous stream.” In knowledge work, the ability to visualize and manage your flow is essential to achieving faster and more consistent delivery. It allows you to understand your capacity, easily identify problems and improve that flow. In a system designed to manage the flow of tangible deliverables,...

About WIP Limits and Card Size

One of the new features just released in Planview AgilePlace Kanban is the ability to specify WIP Limits by Card “Size”, instead of the number of Cards in a lane. Earlier this week, after announcing this feature, I got a couple of “Really?” emails like this one, from Arne Roock: Chris, just saw your new features. Most of them...

Introducing Board Cloning! And more!

We are excited to announce a new set of features for our Team Edition based on ideas coming from our best source – you – our customers. We think you’ll agree that these features help move Kanban from the team level to the enterprise, while still retaining our trademark ease-of-use. And just wait ’til you see some...

Make Process Policies Explicit

In his book, Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business, David Anderson identified five core properties that have been observed to be present in each successful implementation of the Kanban Method. Visualize the Workflow Limit WIP (work in process) Manage Flow Make Process Policies Explicit Improve Collaboratively (using Models and the Scientific Method) The fourth...