Last week, after two days in Düsseldorf and a short stopover in Vienna, I headed on to South Africa for „Applying Kanban“ and „Improving Kanban“. It was almost like a class reunion because some of the participants who came from all over South Africa had already attended my „Applying Kanban“ course a few months ago. I also had the pleasure to meet with Joanne Perold (one of her relatives cultivated the Pinotage which is one of my favourite wines). She agreed to recording two videos for our „Lean Business Agility“ series and so we talked about Scrum in one of them and the second video revolves around the question: „What to do if your working system is congested?“ This problem usually occurs when starting to work with WiP-Limits.
By the way, my idea of turning the project traffic light upside down in order to begin every project with status “red” got a great response in my South African trainings (see my recent blog entry for more information). If you combine it with continuous forecasting, the upturned traffic light very well reflects the actual project reality and therefore sets an end to wishful thinking. This makes it way easier to identify problems early on and to address them at the right time. To the participants it appeared very logical and one project leader who took part is eager to find a way of applying the idea in his daily work. I’m already curious what he will tell me about his experiences!