Holy Land Kanban
Holy Land Kanban
Real-world agility from the frontiers of using flow distilled into evergreen Kanban wisdom
About the Book
In the mid-2010s, we faced the same breakdowns you’re seeing today:
• Backlogs exploding faster than teams can deliver
• Endless WIP, constant firefighting
• Ceremonies for ceremony’s sake
Holy Land Kanban is the story of how teams in Israel discovered a gentler, principle-led path:
- Visualize Flow: We moved from buried work to bright Kanban boards.
- Limit WIP: We reclaimed focus by capping in-flight work.
- Pull‐Based Delivery: We stopped pushing “features” and let teams pull when ready.
- Feedback Rhythms: We replaced noisy stand-ups with lightweight cadences that actually drove learning.
- Evolutionary Change: We let the system evolve—one change at a time—rather than big-bang rewrites.
Why It’s Still Relevant
The chapters you’ll read about “Limiting WIP” and “Kanban cadences” feel as urgent now as they did in 2015. Today’s AI experiments, cross-functional product ops, and “scaled” portfolio rollouts all stumble over the same traps you’ll find here—yet the solution remains the same:
- Make work visible
- Respect context and capacity
- Improve collaboratively, step by step
Who Should Read It
- Product leaders wrestling with dozens of AI pilots
- Transformation leads disillusioned by heavy frameworks
- Engineering managers seeking a lightweight operating model
You won’t find new buzzwords or top-down mandates. You’ll find stories, principles, and practices that you can apply today—and still rely on in ten years.
Table of Contents
-
Kanban - Beyond the Basics
- Collaborating with specialized roles using kanban classes of service
- Encouraging Feature-level progress tracking in Kanban
- How I would simulate time-boxed agile in the @getkanban kanban board game
- Kanban early warning using a predictive variant of SPC
- Lean/Kanban approach to Teams
- Linking Team Modes to RightShifting
- MMF driven sprints in a Kanban world
- My thoughts on how Kanban and TOC Critical Chain relate
- Patterns for getting to a lower WIP level in a system -- The Freeze, No New Work, Limit Later, and some Mashups\ldots {
- The Agile Lowest Common Denominator -- Avoiding a slowdown due to the weakest link
- Touching your electronic kanban board
-
Agility at Large
- Fair Process and Agile -- going further than the Scrum Team
- Driving Motivation -- an exercise for understanding the Daniel Pink's Drive model
- How does the performance objectives process change in a Lean/Agile world?
- If productivity experts tell me to keep email closed most of the day -- why shouldn't I avoid looking at defects for most of the release?
- Punctuated Equilibriums, Containers, all things Complexity and how Kanban fits in
- The Ant and the Grasshopper -- Application for product development
- Thoughts about the Toyota Kata in the world of Knowledge/Technology work
- "We are already Lean/Agile" -- Really?
- Why I think Slack is highly important during an Agile/Kanban transition
- Using Kanban to drive Continuous Improvement and Management Teams
- Want to experience agile in an accelerated form and focus on innovation at the same time? Try an agile FedEx day!
-
Kanban - Not Just for Software Development
- Kanban in HR
- Using Kanban to improve audit management
-
Kanban thinking in Scrum Land
- Want my elevator-pitch answer to what is Kanban for a Scrum rookie?
- Scrumban when will this be done
- Scrum Sprint Commitment Rant
-
Focus on Testing Aspects
- So what is the right ratio between developers and testers?
- Finding the right Dev to Test Ratio when working in Kanban
- QA Effort Effectiveness
-
Lean/Agile in the Holy Land
- Israeli Culture and the Evolutionary Revolution
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