The most common question delivery teams are typically asked is also the most damaging one:


“When will it be done?”


Not because the question is unreasonable, customers are absolutely entitled to ask, but because most organisations answer it in a way that guarantees disappointment. Dates get guessed, confidence gets projected, risks get accepted and uncertainty gets quietly ignored until it turns into high profile failure. Yes, an estimate is better than no estimate but estimates turn into commitments and that only leads to problems.

If you only tracked one metric for your flow of work, this would be it.

Not cycle time.
Not throughput.
Not a beautifully colour-coded cumulative flow diagram.

Work Item Age.

After coming across the same situation a few times, I decided it’s time to write about an approach to software delivery team structure that we have used with great success at a major government organisation around 2018-2021. Since then I have worked with three other organisations that seem to suffer from the very same problem - they find it difficult or slow to execute delivery of features or product increments where there are multiple teams involved in the end to end implementation.

Agile coaching emerged as a key role during the rise of Agile methodologies in the early 2000s. Initially, Agile was intended to transform the way software development was managed, focusing on flexibility, team collaboration, and customer-centric approaches. 

I recently had a conversation with a team I was helping with their workflow. Upon explaining the need to define policies for when work begins and ends, and policies for when it transitions between different stages I was asked why they would ever need more stages than simply [To Do] -> [In Progress] -> [Done]

If you know something about Kanban and perhaps a little bit about Portfolio Kanban, you may be aware of the need to know and display two signals for your epics that will help you manage your flow of work better.

When I introduce myself as a kanban consultant I sometimes get a puzzled look back. So here are some thoughts on the subject.
Kanban coaching consultants (or just kanban consultant) play a vital role in helping organisations adopt and implement the Kanban Method effectively.

This is the second part of my posts on filling in the Lean canvas. If you’ve come across this article first, you should take a look at part 1 to begin with. Lean Canvas is a one-page business model template that helps startups decompose their business model quickly. It is part of Ash Maurya’s Continuous Innovation Framework and while on the surface it looks simple, filling it in can be tricky and can lead you in the wrong direction.

Lean canvas is a one-page business model template that helps entrepreneurs, intra-prenuers and startups begin decomposing their business model quickly and efficiently. It is a visual tool that forces you to think through the key elements of your business model, such as your target market, value proposition, and revenue model. It can fully replace a 30 page business plan in helping you answer the most important questions for your business model. The Lean canvas is part of Ash Maurya’s Continuous Innovation Framework which constitutes an essential building block to our method for starting and growing your business.

When a team or organisation have never come across Kanban for knowledge work, it is necessary to take a step back and explain the method and the benefits in simple words. This isn’t always easy!

It happens in our practice to come across teams and individuals who have never experienced the benefits of using a certain method or practice to achieve an improvement of some sort. In this case we are going to explore using Agile Software Delivery.

Calculating work item age is an essential part of running and optimising a workflow using Kanban practices. Contrary to popular belief you can benefit from Kanban measures and workflow optimisation regardless of what other processes you may have implemented (e.g. Scrum or DSDM or even a scaling framework). For the purpose of this article I would assume that you understand the ideas of Kanban for knowledge work and that you will know why tracking work item age is essential.. 

Do I start my day with a coffee or just a large glass of water? Should I stick to black coffee or go for a flat-white? I love flat-white but who needs the milk, right? You can easily imagine your life as a series of decisions that you have to make all day, every day. Even when it doesn’t seem like it....