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Mengenal trend : KANBAN Project Management

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introduction: Simple Kanban board , basic source From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia with self modified

A kanban board is one of the tools which can be used to implement the kanban method for a project.

Did you remember  Post it- 3M?

Kanban boards are perceived as a variation on traditional kanban cards. Instead of the signal cards that represent demand or capacity, the board utilizes magnets, plastic chips, colored washers or sticky notes to represent work items.[1] Each of these objects represents an item in a production process as it moves around the board. Its movement corresponds with a manufacturing process.[2] At its simplest, the board is usually divided into three sections: “awaiting production”, “work in progress” and “completed work”. Complex Kanban boards can be created that visualise the flow of work across a value stream map.[3] Employees move cards to the section on the board that coincides with the receptacle it represents.

A simple kanban board,

Application

Kanban can be used to organize many areas of an organisation and can be designed accordingly. The simplest Kanban board consists of three columns: “to-do”, “in progress” and “done”. Business functions that use Kanban boards include:

The most popular example of kanban board for agile or lean software development consists of: Backlog, Ready, Coding, Testing, Approval and Done columns. It is also a common practice to name columns in a different way, for example: Next, In Development, Done, Customer Acceptance, Live.
  • Kanban for marketing teams
  • Kanban for HR teams
  • Organisational strategy and executive leadership teams
  • Personal task management or “Personal Kanban as described and promoted by Jim Benson.
  • Audit teams

Principles

  • visualize workflow
  • limit the number of tasks under “in progress
  • pull work from column to column
  • monitor, adapt, improve

kanban

Tupalo’s Kanban board

 

Lean sounds a bit abstract on its own, but combine it with Kanban and it’s easy to build your own Lean project management system. Conceived by Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno and implemented in 1953, Kanban is set up much like a factory floor, where a part might start out as a piece of metal and then, one step at a time, is turned into a finished part through a series of steps. In the same way when using Kanban, you’ll do some work towards a project, then ship that item on down the line to the next station where something else is done.

Kanban also pulls inspiration from the grocery store model: for maximum efficiency, carry just enough on your shelves to meet customers demand. So, in Kanban, instead of plowing ahead on shipping a complete project, you can leave tasks at various stages until they’re needed—whether that’s half-made, low-demand parts in a factory, un-edited blog posts in your queue without a publish date, or anything else that’s waiting for a need in your workflow.

It’s a lot more laid back than Scrum—there’s no set time for sprints, no assigned roles outside of the product owner, and a zen-like focus on only the task at hand. You could have meetings about your overall projects, or not: it’s up to your team’s needs.

kanban

All you have to do is define the stages of your workflow, then setup a way to move each task from one stage to the other. In a factory, you might have different boxes or shelves for each stage: raw materials in the first, half-made parts in the second, and completed parts in the third. For other projects, you might have a card—whether a note in a program, or a physical piece of paper on a board—where you list info about a task, and you’ll move that card to different lists as the task progresses.

Your Kanban system can be as flexible as you want—it’s really just a way to visualize the Agile idea—but there’s four pillars of the Kanban philosophy that can help make sure your projects get shipped. These include:

  • Cards (Kanban translates to “visual card”): Each task has a card that includes all relevant info about it; this makes sure everything to complete the tasks is always at hand.
  • Cap on work in progress: Limit how many cards are in play at once; this prevents teams from over-committing.
  • Continuous Flow: Move down the list of backlogs in order of importance, and make sure something’s always being worked on.
  • Constant improvement (otherwise known as “kaizen“): Analyze the flow to determine how efficiently you’re working, and always strive to improve it.
Kanban strengths

KANBAN STRENGTHS

Like Scrum, Kanban fits best with a highly cohesive team that knows what it takes to keep the flow going—but unlike Scrum, it’s designed for teams that are self-motivated and don’t need as much management or deadlines. It’s great for those who lean toward seeing the entire project at a glance.

While the two-week Scrum rule is absent and subprojects can take however long they’ve been given, you should still have an overall focus on efficiency—which should help save resources. If you’re careful to follow Kanban rules and only assign as much work as a team can handle, projects are less likely to go past deadline and team members are less likely to juggle other distractions. And because the product owner can change tasks that aren’t currently being worked on along the way, it allows for flexibility without frustration.

Kanban weaknesses

KANBAN WEAKNESSES

If only one of your team members has a certain in-demand skill, the individual can hold up everything. Kanban is ideal for teams that have members with overlapping skills, so that everyone can pitch in and help move the backlog list to zero. It’s also best for places where time on the overall project isn’t quite as crucial; if you must ship by certain deadlines, TPM or Scrum give you the time management structure you need.

SCRUM

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Arguably the most structured framework of the Agile methods, Scrum was firstintroduced in the 1986 as a way for “teams to work as a unit to reach a common goal,” according to its inventors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. Scrum takes parts of Traditional and Agile project management ideas, and combines them for a structured yet flexible way to manage projects.

Like Agile, Scrum breaks projects up into tasks that are completable on their own, and then assigns each a “sprint”—two to four-week slots of time dedicated to ship that phase of the project, with daily sprints to ship some part of that phase. It’s that focus on time that makes Scrum a bit more like TPM, bringing more structure to the Agile idea.

scrum

Then, to make sure the project is progressing as expected and meeting goals that may have changed along the way, Scrum requires a reassessment—and potential project changes—at the end of each sprint. It also divides responsibilities into three roles: the Product Owner (PO), the Scrum Master and the Team.

The Product Owner, who should be deeply familiar with all aspects of development, makes sure that everything aligns with business goals and customer needs with a mile-high view of the overall project. The Scrum Master is the team cheerleader—a liaison between the PO and the rest of the team—who makes sure the team is on track in each individual sprint. The Team then is the people working in each sprint, dividing the tasks and making sure everything is shipped.

With all this management and focus on deadlines, Scrum’s main structure revolves around 5 meetings: Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.

  • Backlog Refinement Meeting (also called “Backlog Grooming”): This meeting is much like the planning phase of TPM, and is held on day one of each sprint—you’ll look over the tasks left in the project, things left behind from previous sprints, and will decide what to focus on. The PO makes the call on how to prioritize tasks, and this ultimately determines how efficient the sprints are.
  • Sprint Planning Meeting: Once the PO decides what to focus on, this meeting helps the team understand what they’ll be building and why. You could share “user stories,” describing features from the customer’s point of view, or could simply divide tasks for each team to work on during the sprint.
  • Daily Scrum Meetings: Simple daily meetings that should only last about 15 minutes, Scrum meetings are a way for team members to update each other on progress. This meeting is not the time or place to air issues—those will go to the Scrum master outside of the daily meetings—but instead is a place to keep the ball rolling.
  • Sprint Review: Since a potentially shippable item is expected at the end of each sprint, the Scrum framework naturally places an emphasis on review. Team members will present what they’ve completed to all stakeholders. While this meeting pushes accountability, its goal is to make sure that the sprint’s completed items match up with business and user goals.
  • Sprint Retrospective: Held immediately after the sprint review meeting, the Sprint retrospective is full of collaborative feedback. Looking at successes and hold ups, everyone decides what is working (what they should continue doing) and what isn’t working (what they should stop doing). This should inspire the focus of the next sprint.

Where other project management systems might look like they simplify your projects and make them seem more manageable, Scrum can at first glance look overwhelming. You’ll need to delegate responsibilities and plan extra meetings—but that overhead can help ensure your projects are successful and stay on track. It’s a structured way to make sure everything gets done.

scrum strengths

SCRUM STRENGTHS

Scrum is designed for projects that need parts of the project shipped quickly, while still making it easy to respond to change during the development process. With so many meetings and ways to delegate tasks, it’s also great to use when parts of the team may not be as familiar with a product’s context (i.e. developers from different industry backgrounds working on a system for the financial sector). You’ll always have someone looking out for the project as a whole, so if each person on the team doesn’t understand the entire project, that’s OK.

Netflix is a great example of Scrum’s ability to help you ship fast. It updates its website every two weeks, and Scrum was a good match because it stresses the user experience, eliminates what doesn’t work, and leaves a small window of time to get things done.

For each site iteration, the designers would test new features, forget the ones that didn’t work out and move on to new functionalities. Most of the benefits the Netflix team saw with Scrum was the ability to “fail fast.” As opposed to launching one massive redesign with many components, their bi-weekly incremental design changes were easy to track; if something went awry, they knew exactly what it was tied to—and could fix it, fast.

scrum weaknesses

SCRUM WEAKNESSES

Like Netflix, you may experience downfalls of Scrum, such as upset designers who saw their beloved work chucked after testing showed it didn’t work—especially when the testing comes so quickly and some may feel that the new ideas would work with more time. You might also have trouble adjusting if your team is accustomed to long release cycles—or, depending on your work, you might find shipping so often isn’t necessary.

Scrum’s meetings and management overhead can also be overkill for some projects, turning into something where you’re more focused on planning sprints than you are on actually getting work accomplished during them.

Lean

Agile project management dictates that you break your work up into smaller, shippable portions, but it doesn’t say much about how to manage each of those portions of your project. Scrum tries to fix that with managers and meetings; Lean, on the other hand, adds workflow processes to Agile so you can ensure every part of your project is shipped with the same quality.

With Lean project management, you’ll still break up your project into smaller pieces of work that can be completed individually. You’ll also define a workflow for each task, something that’s reminiscent of the Apollo project and its five box system. Perhaps you’ll have a planning, design, production, testing, and shipping phase—or any other workflow of phases that you need for your task. Cooking a meal might need a preparation and cooking step, while a writing workflow might need an editing and fact-checking step.

lean

Lean’s stages and their flexibility make it a great system for making sure each part of your project is done well. It doesn’t have Scrum’s strict deadlines, or force you to work on one thing at a time as TPM does—in fact, you could have various tasks in various phases of your Lean workflow at the same time. What it does do is let you build a system tailored to your team.

Just like Agile, Lean is more of a concept than a set-in-stone project management system. You can use the Lean ideas, and build the system you need for your projects.

lean strengths

LEAN STRENGTHS

If you liked the idea of Agile, but wanted a way to make sure each part of your work is consistently finished with the same level of quality and oversight, Lean gives you the extra tools you need to make that happen. It’s still flexible—you can define the stages of your project portions as you want—but there’s enough structure to make your projects a bit more guided.

lean weaknesses

LEAN WEAKNESSES

Every part of your project doesn’t necessarily need the same level of oversight or the same steps for completion, but lean treats everything the same. That can be one major downfall in using it to manage projects with diverse parts that all need completed.

Lean also doesn’t have any process to make sure the final project is completed, making it easy as it is with Lean to let your projects drag on forever. It’s again something communication can clear up, but it is worth keeping in mind.

How Can Better Project Management Affect Your Business?

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Project-Management.com
PROJECT MANAGEMENT ARTICLES

How Can Better Project Management Affect Your Business?
BY DEFTSOFT · APRIL 16, 2016

If a business is a living body and research is its heart, projects can be interpreted as energy sources. A whole enterprise is woven around gathering projects, completing them on time using presented methodologies and using proceeds from those projects to trail our research after paying off employees.

Project management is a key proficiency to master in a business. Whether you are a self employed entrepreneur or a hard working combatant of an enterprise, efficient project management vitalizes business. It ensures that energy of the entire personnel assigned to that specific undertaking is channelized in a precise direction.

Einstein’s theory of relativity proved how time and space are related to each other. In business too, time and human resources are limited and related to each other. Human resources of an organization are bound with the firm for a specific frame of time. Proper project management can result in efficient operation of their skills. This would lead to more plundering of profits and income generation for business.

A suitable project management ensures that less cash burning happens on behalf of more revenue generation. This creates a better return on investment made in human resources and tangible assets. Better project management affects business in two traditions as mentioned:

Short Term Benefits

Managing and leading a project in right direction ensures its well-timed completion. It enables you to embark on more projects and more complex projects hence resulting in skyrocketing profit generation for the company.

While taking up a project we compute cost of all concrete and insubstantial resources utilized to complete the venture. Based on total cost and adding of earnings, we quote the price of project. While subscriptions to software as well as employees costs compensation, an efficient project management ensures that our profits are roughly as we projected.

Long Term Benefits

If your corporation is a small to medium level outsourcing based company, chances are that projects are acquired via online profiles and bidding. While timely completion of a project makes an exceptional reputation on public profiles, it has its lingering benefits too. Client retention starts to happen as a customer whose project was completed timely will surely fancy more of his projects prepared by you.

Apart from retaining a client, more projects will start to come in, further accelerating the business expansion. Time and excellence oriented customers will start getting inclined to get their projects done from you. This will increase quality of projects generating more revenue and providing more experience.

Just like organic linking makes a website popular, real customer’s reference to probable customers will further increase market credibility. More projects will flow in because of customer testimonials affecting the business optimistically.

It has been asserted from an extended time that “A happy customer is the best salesman”. Better project management’s ultimate goal is customer satisfaction and Organization’s profit. Effect of better project management on business is exactly like effect of servicing on a car: Excellent ROI, smooth operation and customer satisfaction.

How to Make Project Management Easier for Many Projects

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT ARTICLES

How to Make Project Management Easier for Many Projects
BY ANDREW MAKAR · MARCH 26, 2016

Many people are entrusted with the title of “project manager” often regardless of whether they are interested in the role. There is an entire industry aimed at the project management profession with hundreds of thousands of certified project management professionals, yet projects get delivered every day with and without certified project managers.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m Project Management Professional (PMP) certified and actually enjoy a healthy discussion on proper project management processes. However, project management doesn’t have to be overly complex or intimidating as described in project management textbooks (it can be as simple as the process presented in a guide such as: The Six Step Guide to Practical Project Management).

You need the right tools and processes

One of the best executives I ever met prided himself on not having PMP certification, yet he was responsible for his organisation’s enterprise programs and projects. He acknowledged that project management processes, tools and techniques were important, but just as vital are communication and common sense.

He trusted his team to pick the right tool for the job and adjust the processes to meet the project needs. People don’t have time today for overly complex processes producing reams of documentation and checklists. They need to deliver projects not paperwork.

Simplicity grows in importance as work grows

Project managers are also expected to manage multiple projects at once. As more projects are added to a person’s workload, the need for simplified project management processes increases.

Project management office organisations try to improve project delivery by adding a common project portfolio management tool throughout the organisation. Although these tools provide top-down visibility into a project’s performance, these tools can add to the project manager’s administrative burden. When a complex project management tool is introduced, the project manager risks spending more time administering the tool than actually managing the project.

I’ve seen this first hand when running a project with more than 100 resources from many different resource pools. I spent more time ensuring resource needs were forecasted and conflicts resolved than helping to resolve project issues.

You need a flexible tool

If the project management tool you use isn’t flexible with scheduling, the project manager can spend hours if not days trying to tweak the schedule to fit the project management tool constraints.

For one project, I spent more time allocating project team resources to high-level tasks in a meaningless project schedule just so everyone could record time. I maintained a separate schedule for all the real projects tasks, but needed to do duplicate administration in a separate system.

Project management just doesn’t have to be this hard. It is really quite simple. Processes and tools are always added with good intentions but project managers need to pick the right tool and the right process for the job.

Simple steps for most projects

Complex projects will require more processes and tools. However, many projects can be delivered following a simple series of steps.

Every project needs to answer several key questions including:

Why are we doing this project?
What is the end goal?
Who needs to be involved?
What needs to be done to achieve the goal?
When and how will it be done?
Depending on the project’s complexity, the answers to these questions could be a simple presentation or a 50-page project charter that few will ever read. I remember working on one project where the running joke was the project had launched yet the project charter was “almost ready to be signed”.

It consisted of a 45-page Word document that no one would ever read in great detail or even sign off. The project still delivered on time and was successful. This example begs the question – was all that process really needed?

7 Leadership Lessons Tech CEOs Learned from Their Moms

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7 Leadership Lessons Tech CEOs Learned from Their Moms

  
KATHLEEN SHANAHAN 05.09.14 5:02 AM
It’s no doubt that the indispensable lessons we’ve learned from our moms are inextricably woven into our daily lives. But for some of Silicon Valley’s top CEOs and founders, it’s also woven into their leadership styles and company cultures.

seven business leaders share the leadership lessons from how to create balance to how to manage a team that they learned from their moms.

1. NEVER GIVE UP
“My mom encouraged me to never accept ‘no’ as an answer to a problem. She taught me to keep asking questions, explore all options, voice my opinion, and never give up because a majority of problems can be solved this way. This advice not only shaped me into the leader that I am today, but is also a part of the Culture Statement at JiWire. It is the main reason why my team pushes so hard to break boundaries, innovate and improve on an idea that other people once thought couldn’t be done.”

– Michael Fordyce, CEO of JiWire, a mobile audience intelligence company

2. HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY
“My mother always taught me to be honest with myself. She didn’t mean it in a way that would limit potential, but rather open my eyes to where I could grow. I’ve turned this idea into a guiding principle at Clarizen—awareness. My team and I have learned that we need to be aware of our strengths and, more importantly, our weaknesses. We need to understand the limits of our knowledge. It’s much more important to ask the right questions versus have all the answers.”

– Avinoam Nowogrodski, CEO and founder of Clarizen, makers of an enterprise-class solution for work collaboration and project management

3. BALANCE IS ESSENTIAL
“Unlike most mothers, my mom often ends our calls with, ‘How is your sales quota?’ I’m a product-focused CEO and having a mother who at one point in her career managed more than 1,000 salespeople has taught me the importance of not only having a strong product team, but also a strong sales team. More importantly, you have to invest in the right people at the right time to create a company that can successfully build, market, and sell a product. In the end, it all comes back to the people you choose to invest in.”

– Stefan Groschupf, CEO and cofounder of Datameer, a self-service big data analytics solution for Hadoop

4. CELEBRATE INDIVIDUALITY
“The biggest thing my mom taught me is to understand that people are built differently and act in the ways they do for intrinsically good reasons. She’d hold up her hand and say, “Look at the five fingers on my hand. They’re all sized differently, each with unique strengths and abilities and that’s why they work so well together.” That simple visual depiction helped me understand at a very early age that the way to build lasting and successful organizations of people is to understand and embrace their unique differences.”

– Tawheed Kader, CEO and founder of ToutApp, the sales acceleration platform that helps teams close deals faster with the power of tracking, templates, and predictive analytics

5. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE RISKS
“The best piece of advice my mother shared with me was: ‘Live for the moment, and don’t put life on hold.’ She meant that in order to be successful in life, you sometimes need to take calculated risks by having the confidence to follow your instincts to make critical decisions that ultimately drive progression and results.”

– Jonathan Gale, CEO of NewVoiceMedia, a cloud contact center solutions provider

6. YOU ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS THE PEOPLE YOU SURROUND YOURSELF WITH
“’I’ is for accepting responsibility when things go wrong—the buck stops with me. ‘We’ is for making commitments and signing up to new challenges—the team is never alone. ‘You’ is for distributing the glory that comes with success—the team that did the work gets the credit. My mom taught me this style of leadership and it has driven me through my career. To me, it means that you are never better than the team around you and gaining the trust, loyalty, and buy-in of your team is the key to any successful endeavor.”

– Doug Winter, CEO and cofounder of Seismic, a mobile content management platform for sales and marketing leaders

7. THE GOLDEN RULE
“My mother taught me to treat others as you would want to be treated. This lesson helped me shape our company’s core philosophy to build a deep sense of respect and responsibility toward our employees and our customers. This is especially important for a cloud platform vendor, because we can’t just write the software and ship it—our customers rely on us to keep their systems running, and we know the only way to earn their trust is by treating them with respect.”

– George Gallegos, CEO of Jitterbit, a provider of fast, agile integration cloud solutions for the modern enterprise

—Kathleen Shanahan is the founder of BOCA Communications and comes from a long line of women, family-owned businesses. Beyond her passion for PR and her deep sense of commitment to clients and employees, she is also a mother herself with a 3-year old daughter and an 11-year-old Boston terrier named Zoe. They all reside in San Francisco with her husband.