Monday, May 18, 2009

More blogosphere buzz about Lean & Kanban

John Strickler has this thoughtful piece about Lean & Kanban and how he was introduced to Agile via Mary Poppendieck and Alan Shalloway following a background that including reading Factory Physics and learning Six Sigma. Nice to see someone with a background in reducing variation and an understanding of queuing theory talking about this stuff. So few Agile folks seem to understand what I mean when I say Kanban has an underlying model.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Palermo picks up on my piece for Borland on why you should just say “No!” to an formal Agile transition initiative, Why Agile Transition Initiatives Might Fail!

Margaret Rouse highlights Kenji Hiranbe and I and observes that Kanban is a way to visualize bottleneck in a software development project.

Keith Henry’s been researching how to tailor agile to your organization. While he cites my work on Agile+CMMI he might enjoy my series for Borland more: Agile Transition Initiatives - Just Say No!; Creating an Agile Culture!

Jason Yip rediscovered one of my older gems identifying that liberal versus conservative culture is a bigger influence than high trust versus low trust in driving Agile adoption.

Pascal Van Cawenberghe asks “Why Estimate?” and cites several leading thinkers on this space including Amit Rathore, Joshua Kerievsky and me.

Richard Veryard tickled me with his wittily titled Restaurant at the End of the Universe over at his Demanding Change blog.

Defense Industry Daily was so impressed with my Top 10 rated talk at the SEPG conference that they suggest it’s time to Sharpen Yourself a Kanban System for Software Engineering. Yes indeed! :-D We already have a Kanban implementation with the Danish Department of Defense. I’m hoping for more traction in the defense sector in the next year. I really do hope that Kanban becomes the unifying force that brings the Agile world and the big software and system engineering firms together.

Hillel Glazer noted that my SEPG session on high maturity metrics and Agile was packed and locked out and no one left early. I wonder who I impressed? His notes from Wednesday tell the tale of the Agile + CMMI open space with a super picture of how many people we had at that session and then with another wonderful picture of one of my slides we get Hillel’s take on my Agility & High Maturity talk - naturally Kanban is at the heart of it but Hillel calls it correctly - set high maturity behavioral expectations early and choose metrics and data wisely. His Tuesday notes cover the CMMI + Agile: Why not embrace both talk given by Mike Konrad and supported by Hillel, Jeff Dalton and I.

The folks at Enthiosys (Luke Hohmann et al) have been thinking about Agile maturity models and comparing my work on Agile + CMMI with Bas Vodde and Jeff Sutherland’s Nokia Test.

Allan Kelly gives us a list of 10 Things to Know About Kanban Software Development. Very handy! Allan also helps us to Make Sense of Kanban.

Meanwhile, Boris Gloger describes my use of Kanban as “harmful for software development.” How many people actually doing it believe that? I wonder if Boris has ever tried it? Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

SPaMCast - Agile Management

Here’s another recent podcast featuring me with Tom Cagley. His Software Process & Management (SPaM) cast attracts some stellar people. Click the main link and look at the company I’m keeping: Tim Lister; Lisa Crispin; Capers Jones; Esther Derby; and a personal favorite of mine Bill Phifer from EDS whom I got to know while I was with Microsoft. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineeing, Project+Management, CMMI

Friday, May 15, 2009

Blogosphere Buzz about Lean & Kanban

Since the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference there has been a lot of blogosphere buzz about the conference and Kanban specifically. Here’s a roundup of what I’ve seen…

Mike Cottmeyer posted the most comprehensive thoughts as he was blogging throughout the event. Here are his posts in chronological order.

Day 1 - May 6th - Lean Day
#LK2009 Shalloway, Leffingwell, Middleton
#LK2009 Sutton and Mortensen
#LK2009 Observations from the Lean & Kanban Conference
#LK2009 Rathore & Ladas
#LK2009 Tabaka, Hsu & Shalloway

Day 2 - May 7th - Kanban Day
Announcing the formation of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium
#LK2009 Anderson, Scotland and Hathaway
#LK2009 Vale, Cook and Landes
#LK2009 Willeke, Shinkle and Laribee

Day 3 - Open Space Day
#LK2009 Alan Shalloway (Closing Keynote)

Post Conference Thoughts
Lean or Kanban or Agile
Why a Lean Software & Systems Consortium? Why a Lean Certification?

[update] Mike Bria highlights Mike’s post on InfoQ with additional commentary

There was a lot of talk at the conference about achieving high maturity (the equivalent of CMMI ML4 or ML5, quantitatively managed or optimizing organizations) with Kanban and how Kanban appeared not only to enable achievement of high maturity but also accelerate the rate at which that high maturity could be achieved. Chris Shinkle of SEP reported that some teams had achieved essentially a quantitatively managed maturity in 6 months. The amazing thing is that Chris felt the need to apologize to the audience because it had taken so long Since, the conference some academics have begun to take an interest and we’re likely to see a couple of academic studies over the next year looking at high maturity Kanban teams.

Alisson Vale presented how his team at Phidelis in Brazilia, Brazil, work in a highly mature optimizing fashion and he demonstrated their home grown tool - a sort of cross between an electronic kanban card wall, an electronic executive dashboard and a Facebook-like social media tool. The tool was impressive but the organization behind it humbled us all. I truly believe that Phildelis must be the highest maturity team on the planet. They build software with the kind of supply chain precision that Dell builds computers. It has to be seen to be believed. I would urge you to pick up the proceedings book when it’s available and read Alisson’s paper. Meanwhile, here is his latest blog post with his thoughts on the conference, Inside the Lean & Kanban Conference. And if you can’t wait to get your copy of the proceedings book you might want to read Kanban: When Signalization Matters in the meanwhile.

Though not at the conference, Benjamin Mitchell has been making huge strides with his team at BNP Parisbas in London. Here’s his first ever blog post detailing how they use statistical process control charts to drive a quantitatively managed continuous improvement program, Control/Capability Charts on a Kanban Software Development Project.

Israel Gat kindly published John Heintz’s thoughts on attending the conference. By posting them to the Agile Executive blog Israel gave John’s thoughts and stimulated a really valuable thread of conversation. Do go and read all the comments not just the article.

Alan Shalloway posted his own thoughts on the conference at his Net Objectives blog. Alan made a lot of notes during the event and distilled out some really useful learning. He made the remark at the beginning of the conference that he believed it would be seen as a landmark event and folks who weren’t there would look back and wish they had been in years to come. In this retrospective blog post he explains why even his expectations were exceeded.

Jack Milunsky picked up on Sterling Mortensen’s “Stop Starting stuff and start finishing stuff” in his Successful Lean Philosophy post. Actually, this quote has  a history. I first used it at USC in March 2004 referring to the Device Management project at Motorola and the first real examples of Cumulative Flow Diagrams in action. Later in 2004 and 2005 I used the same charts and story at a couple of Lean events with Don Reinertsen including the Lean Design & Development conference and I believe the other one was the Management Round Table Lean New Product Development event. Don liked the quote so much he started to use it. All of this was pre-Kanban for me.

Sterling liked the Motorola story and the Cumulative Flow Diagrams so much that he took it back and used it in the mix at HP’s Boise location on printer firmware development. It was a part of the mix of Lean initiatives that ultimately improved productivity by 8x and shortened cycle times from 18+ months to 4 months. The following year Sterling returned to the same conference with his case study. He quoted Don, quoting me, and pointed out how this simple message backed with the reference of a cumulative flow diagram is really powerful at changing behavior for the better.

Karl Scotland has been busy with a few blog posts. This one discusses Kanban and Time Boxes. And this other one looks at motivations for improvement and how Kanban appears to differ from earlier agile methods, Anxiety or Boredom Driven Process Improvement. This second post is inspired by Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi who’s 3 books were a significant influence on some of my early work in management science and process improvement. It’s great to see his work inspiring others in the field.

Karl also announced the Lean Software & Systems Consortium and provided some of his own thoughts on it.

Dean Leffingwell on his Scaling Software Agility blog described the conference as “one of the most impactful events” he’s attended in many years.

Not conference related but a some other interesting perspectives on Kanban appeared this week. Joe Campbell explains why the teachings of Bruce Lee resonate with his Kanban experience in Be Like Water.

Have you seen any more blogosphere buzz about Lean & Kanban 2009? Please leave a comment Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Friday, April 24, 2009

Agile Transition Initiatives - Just Say No!

I’ve joined a bunch of my old friends who work for Borland to blog about Agile Transformation at enterprise scale. I have long ties with Borland through my connection to Peter Coad and Togethersoft. I’m delighted to be blogging with my old buddy from Singapore, Stephen Palmer (the Dev team manager on the original FDD project, co-author of A Practical Guide to Feature Driven Development, and guru at color modeling).

My first post is titled Agile Transition Initiatives : Just Say No! And is the first in a series where I’ll be talking about organizational maturity and capability along with the notion of a kaizen (continuous improvement) culture of innovation facilitated from the top, but led from the bottom.

These days Borland is a very different business to the old developer tools IDE business that they spun off as Code Gear. A few years ago they acquired Terraquest, a firm run by ex-SEI and CMM expert Bill Curtis. We became friends while I was working on MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at Microsoft. Bill provided me with guidance on CMMI Level 4 metrics and we talked a lot about Deming and whether “common cause systems” approach could be applied to knowledge work problems like software development.

Meanwhile, as Borland has evolved these past few years, their interests and mine have converged - on Enterprise Scale Agile Tranformation. It turns out that the folks there share my opinion that organizational maturity is a vital part of the mix to institutionalizing Agile development at scale and to creating an _agile_ business. While I’ve been advocating Agile+CMMI they’ve quietly been building traction around their own maturity model concept. I’ll be contributing 3 or 4 blog posts per quarter specifically focused on large scale Agile adoption and business agility over at the Agile Transformation Forum. Check it out! There is some really great community content there with some true experts writing it. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Borland, CMMI, Stephen+Palmer, Peter+Coad, Bill+Curtis 

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Scott Ambler reviews CMMI+Agile Technical Note

Nice balanced piece from Scott Ambler in Dr. Dobb’s Journal revewing the new Technical Note from the SEI which I co-authored. One slight correction to Scott’s piece, I actually wasn’t an author of the Agile Manifesto (Jon Kern represented the FDD community at that meetings) rather I was an author of the Declaration of Interdependence that founded the APLN. Not sure that I want to be known as one of the AC5 though  Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, CMMI, Hillel+Glazer, Scott+Ambler, Mike+Konrad, Jeff+Dalton, Sandra+Shrum, Software+Engineering, SEI, Carnegie+Mellon, Dr+Dobb’s