The TopLeft Blog

Kanban for project management goes as far back as the early 1960s, with Industrial Engineer and Businessman Taiichi Ohno creating a simple inventory planning system for Toyota automotive. What pushed him to develop such...

This blog post is based on both my experience and learnings from The Lean CEO book by Jacob Stoller, looking closely at what organizations like Toyota were doing in Japan several decades ago. I (Wim) hope to blog more...

So I’ve been thinking about this question for a while… what does it mean to be doing Kanban? Obviously I’ve been committed to Kanban for a while as we’ve built a solution around it, but even though we have all kinds of...

How CW Agile Board is currently better than CW Kanban Quick Create for ticket Block/Unblock tickets (without requiring a specific status) Can work on tickets in simple mode – hide finance, resources etc with a link to...

As I heard at a ConnectWise Share (User Group) event recently from Sea-Level Operations, if a computer shop received 8 new computers a day and threw out 3, they would go out of business real quick. In the service...

Here’s a quick heads-up about changes at CW Kanban that will make your life better. Do share this post with your team members so they too could benefit from these updates!

In February, Wim hosted a joint webinar with Manuel Palachuk. We covered the Mindset, Methods, and Tools for Agile Service Delivery with many in attendance. Click here to request the recording and access the slidedecks,...

It’s been way too long since I sent out some Lean/Kanban education! In January I did a post on Visualizing Neglected Work, based on Dominica DeGrandis’s book, which was well received. I have heard from multiple people...

I was speaking last week with an MSP consultant in the UK, and he asked for a demo of creating a Kanban for their desired work process (weekly work sprints). One of their big goals is to avoid strict scheduling/dispatch...

I ask this question daily: How can we optimize workflow?

Push vs Pull Our friend Manuel Palachuck just published a blog post on Push vs Pull that I thought explains it quite clearly. It is a big cultural and organizational change from traditional management methods (dispatch,...

Kanban Implementation Here is a draft of a work-in-progress guideline on implementing Kanban in a Connectwise environment. This is based on our experiences and research so far, and will continue to evolve as we mature...

Your Engineers Are Drowning (And Your Clients Know It) Are you watching your best technicians burn out while tickets pile up faster than your team can close them? Is critical knowledge trapped in individual engineers'...

Rotting Fruit On the weekend I stumbled upon this YouTube video of how an IT Operations team used Kanban to improve their world for Project and Service delivery. Great ideas and different ways of looking at old...