Recently I was invited to a meeting where the discussion was how to implement Kanban within the team. During the course of the conversation I said, “… we need to start saying “No” more often…” A colleague smiled, “Coming from you, that’s quite a change” I consider customers to be the greatest assets an organization […]
Making Kanban work in matrix organizations
For those of us working in matrix organizations, this is reality. We have to constantly juggle between projects, maintenance and operational work. It takes forever for the work to get done. One who screams the loudest always appears to get attention. Work is typically assigned to teams based on schedules and forecasts. The nail in the coffin is that the estimates are treated as deterministic when they are, in fact, probabilistic; i.e. estimates turn into commitment as soon as it gets entered into the Gantt (or a roadmap)
No such thing as multitasking
There is no such thing as multitasking. Humans are incapable at multitasking. We only task switch. And so do computers. The difference is that computers can task switch at a much faster rate to create an illusion of multitasking. I’ll use the term multitasking and task switching interchangeably for the reminder of this post.