Your path to business agility
Spring is a time of renewal; a time to clear out the old to make space for new opportunities. If you’re using a Kanban board to manage your team’s work, you probably do some regular maintenance to keep your Kanban board up-to-date. However, just like with the closets in your home, from time to time,...
If you read the first two posts in this series, you know why many HR departments are looking to become more Agile, and the benefits they’re experiencing after doing so. To review, Agile HR is simply the application of Agile methodology in the HR department. In practice, it usually means more collaboration, less linear planning,...
An article published by Harvard Business Review in 2017 said, “If software has eaten the world, Agile has eaten the software world.” This is even truer today than just a few years ago when it was written—at that point, a Google search for “Agile software development” generated nearly 14 million results. As of the writing of this...
As enterprises are becoming increasingly Agile, the role of HR in Lean-Agile organizations is being challenged to expand beyond process-oriented HR management, and into truly Lean-Agile people operations. In this series of posts, we’ll be discussing why HR goes Agile, and what happens when HR goes Agile—and how high-performing organizations should approach HR’s transition into...
In the first two posts of this series, we discussed how to get started with continuous improvement: First, how to prepare to practice continuous improvement, by setting up a Kanban board that enables you to track and measure your team’s work. Then, we shared how to gather, prioritize, implement, and measure the impact of your...
In the first post in this series on continuous improvement, we discussed planning to improve, including how to set up your Kanban board to collect meaningful continuous improvement metrics. Continuing our use of the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Adjust) framework, this post will cover the next two steps in the cycle of continuous improvement: Do and Check! DO: IDENTIFY...
Whether you’re still finding your way around your Kanban board or you’ve been practicing Kanban for a while, you’ve likely stumbled upon the phrase ‘continuous improvement.’ At first glance, the meaning of this phrase seems self-evident: It’s just about aiming to always improve, right? Yes—it’s true that the goal of continuous improvement is to help...
Organizational culture is defined as the underlying beliefs, assumptions, values and ways of interacting that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. When implemented holistically and sustainably, Lean methods have been shown to promote a healthy organizational culture. This isn’t a coincidence: Rooted in behavioral psychology, Lean methods emphasize respect for others, effective...
There are many reasons why your team might currently be using a physical Kanban board rather than an online Kanban board. For one, using a physical Kanban board is a great way to learn the fundamentals of Kanban. It can get your team to commit to the idea of sharing work on a shared board,...
Standing meetings get a bad rap—although launched with the intention of keeping a certain topic, goal, or initiative top of mind, they often devolve into disruptive wastes of time that keep teams from doing real work. We all have recurring meetings on our calendars that elicit behind-the-screen eyerolls. However, when facilitated properly and organized around a shared...
