Tools For Agile Blog

The following are my slides from my presentation at the Lean Software and Systems Conference last week.

Different teams use different workflows, yet some common patterns emerge on designing boards to handle different situations. In this post I’ll look at some board patterns to handle some common scenarios. This post is about a board within a single team. I have previously written about enterprise kanban boards that span multiple levels in a company or boards to coordinate multiple teams. So lets start with the patterns.

Continue reading ‘Kanban Board Patterns’ »

If you are working in multiple projects, then you know how complicated it is to track and clear blocking issues from multiple projects. It’s all to easy to get caught up in the details that you forget about some of the blockers. Two weeks later you remember that the blocker you were supposed to resolve is still there, clogging up the flow.

We have a solution for you.
Continue reading ‘Managing blockers just got easier’ »

If you look through the features in your project, you’ll find some that fit the “Fixed Date” class of service. These are work items that need to be completed by a given date. Some examples are

• A feature needs to be added in time to meet a regulatory deadline
• A feature needs to be shown at an upcoming conference

In these cases, there is a big cost if the feature is not ready by the given date.

Another instance where this is used is in Service Level Agreements. Teams that work under SLAs have to complete features within the timeframe prescribed in the SLA, and there could be penalties if the timeframe is not met. This scenario is particularly common with teams that use Kanban on managing maintenance and support projects.

In this screencast, I show how easy it is to manage SLAs and Fixed Date work items in Silver Catalyst. Take a look below