Dan Vacanti joined corbis as ERP project development manager in May 2007, entering the corbis-kanban-experiment during its most productive phase. He worked alongside Anderson and corey-ladas on refining the kanban system's design and became one of the earliest practitioners to develop a rigorous approach to kanban metrics. He later became Anderson's first associate at the David J. Anderson School of Management (djaa-school-of-management), and authored "Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability" (2015), the definitive practitioner guide to kanban flow metrics.
Metrics focus
Vacanti's distinctive contribution within the Corbis collaboration was his focus on measurement and predictability. Where the corbis-kanban-experiment was generating empirical data on lead times, throughput, and work-in-progress as a side effect of the kanban system, Vacanti worked to systematize the collection and interpretation of this data. His interest in statistical process control applied to software delivery — lead time distributions, throughput histograms, cumulative flow diagrams, Monte Carlo simulation for forecasting — became a sustained intellectual project that eventually produced "Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability."
"Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability"
Vacanti's 2015 book actionable-agile-metrics-vacanti is the most rigorous treatment of kanban metrics in the practitioner literature. It addresses the question of how teams can make honest, statistically grounded probabilistic forecasts about delivery — distinguishing between the false precision of date-based estimates and the genuine predictability achievable through flow metrics. The book's approach to cycle time distributions, throughput-based forecasting, and the use of the Actionable Agile tool reflects the empirical orientation that developed at Corbis and at djaa-school-of-management.
First DJAA associate
As Anderson's first associate at djaa-school-of-management, Vacanti helped establish the training curriculum and methodology for teaching the Kanban Method in the years following the kanban-book-publication. His combination of direct implementation experience at Corbis and deep technical knowledge of flow metrics made him a natural fit for the training role. He subsequently developed his own independent consulting and training practice while remaining one of the most recognized figures in the Kanban community.