Introducing the Kanban Guide

The Kanban Guide is a document from ProKanban.org, explaining the bare essence of Kanban for knowledge work. What are those things that are universally true in any Kanban system? What must be present if we’re to legitimately say that we’re using Kanban?

LEGO Exercise: Collaboration

Most teams are a bunch of individual silos that have become good at passing work between each other. This exercise is designed to show how real collaboration is different from the way we normally work.

LEGO Exercise: Technical Debt

Demonstrates the kind of debt we accumulate if we don’t refactor as we go. This exercise will let the attendees experience the pain of dealing with technical debt, rather than just understanding it intellectually.

LEGO Exercise: Simplicity

This exercise demonstrates the value of keeping the design simple and the code small. We’ll generally do this exercise before starting into any of the others as it’s really foundational for all Agile technical practices.

Collocated vs Distributed Teams

For years, agile coaches have been touting the benefits of collocated teams and pointing out the inefficiencies of having people remote. When COVID-19 struck and everyone was required to work from home, we found that while teams certainly weren’t as effective as they’d been in the office, it wasn’t nearly as bad as had been anticipated. How do we make sense of this?

Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats is a technique to improve creativity by focusing our attention on only one perspective at a time. Useful wherever we need creativity - from retrospectives to product planning to strategic visioning.