Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Lean & Kanban Europe Conference

My next public appearance will be at the Lean and Kanban Europe Conference being held in Antwerp Belgium in September 23-24. It promises to be one of the best ever Lean software process conferences. The speaker lineup is amazing! I will be giving a key note and a regular session. I’m delighted by the response that Maarten Volders received from our community with offers to participate. There will be a great bunch of people there. Don’t miss out. Come and experience “the next wave” with the thoughtful, open-minded, systems thinking crowd that comes to Lean and Kanban events. Registration is open now! Maarten tells me he already has about 150 people but we want to see more. Antwerp is a lovely city, great fashion, style, architecture, and beer I hope to see you there. Register now!

Announcing Lean Software & Systems 2011

The 2011 edition of the Lean Software & Systems Conference will be held near Los Angeles, at the Hyatt hotel, Long Beach, California from May 3rd to 6th. This promises to the biggest and best conference for Lean applied to software engineering, IT project management and systems engineering and will bring together the growing community of experts and practitioners from around the globe.

Save the dates for now. More details will be released soon including website, program, call for papers, registration and pricing.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

DZone RefCard Update

The Kanban RefCard at DZone is now available and has been updated to reflect all the edit changes I made to the document last week. You can get it Kanban RefCard.

Speaking personally, I deeply regret the decision to work with DZone. I will never do so again. I have been persuaded to stick with this initiative by Janice Linden-Reed who feels that there is significant value for the community. We understand from DZone CEO, Rick Ross, that more than 6000 copies of the RefCard were downloaded on Tuesday 3rd August. That shows there is a real demand for this. I hope you find it valuable as it was costly for us to produce in time, money and personal stress. Dealing with all the issues this week has further resulted in a significant opportunity cost on other efforts including planning for the Lean Software & Systems conference for 2011.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Problems with DZone RefCard

[I’m updating this blog entry to reflect unfolding events…]

Today DZone published a Kanban RefCard written by Janice Linden-Reed based on 3 chapters of my book and as such it carries my name as co-author. The document was a draft that had no review or copy edit. DZone chose to publish this draft despite the fact that they knew there was a revised edited and reviewed copy just one day away (and available to them today Monday August 2nd.) I reviewed the document on Thursday and heavily red-lined it and took the opportunity to clarify terms and language used and to make some updates to reflect how I currently teach Kanban and present it at conferences.

Hence, the document currently available for download has a number of inaccuracies, some older material and uses some words and terms that are likely to confuse the reader. It is therefore currently not in a good state to be representative of good guidance on “Getting Started with Kanban.” This is no criticism of Janice and her work. As all of us who write know, writing a succinct articulate technical document is incredibly challenging and requires several edit passes and peer reviews. Any first draft is bound to have issues. It’s unfortunate that this draft leaked out, and I had to use my name and position within the community to discredit what DZone had published. Had DZone been more willing to work with us and remove the offending content while it was reviewed none of this would have been necessary, nor would it be public. I, therefore, apologize to Janice if I’ve made her look bad as a result.

After some difficult discussions on the phone and exchanges via public online forum, and back channel discussions through my network within the Agile community, DZone have agreed an edit process to fix the issues. Once this process is complete I will communicate to the community that the Kanban RefCard from DZone is good and available for download. Meanwhile, if you have downloaded it, I’d ask that you discard it, or if you find some elements of it confusing please ignore it and wait for the revised version.

Meanwhile, I am reconsidering my request to DZone to remove the document completely. Currently, I have not authorized publication and am withholding my copyright on the material. I will discuss this with legal counsel later today. If I choose to refuse DZone copyright permission for the document, I will find another way of publishing the content as there does appear to be demand for a succinct handy guide to Kanban such as the RefCard.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Reflections on a Couple of Others’ Thoughts on Scrum Compared to Kanban

A couple of guys both longer in the tooth than me, who have authored more books than me, have also published their experienced thoughts on Scrum and Kanban this past week.

First Alan Shalloway, The Real Differences Between Scrum and Kanban.

Alan lists a number of practices that he sees as different between the two approaches: some of them are core fundamental elements of the Kanban method - the seed properties that generate the emergent Lean behavior in the organization.

Kanban differs from Scrum in the following ways…

1. Make process policies explicit
2. Visibility of process, not merely results
3. Inclusion of Management
4. Flow as an option instead of time-boxed iterations
5. Controlled change management

You need to read Alan’s full post. I feel it is fair and balanced and represents an alternative perspective that broadly follows mine

Secondly, Ken Schwaber posted his own thoughts. Ken had evidently been attending the Microsoft TechEd conference and had seen a presentation on Scrum and Kanban by Joel Semeniuk and Steven Borg. This prompted him to post, Waterfall, Lean/Kanban, and Scrum

This article talks a lot about complexity theory and understanding processes as simple, complicated, and chaotic, and how Ken’s motivation for creating Scrum was based on providing something that worked in the chaotic space. This is all fair enough and interesting in itself. However, the post seems biased by Ken’s assumption that we’re doing manufacturing kanban systems on software development. Ken has no actual experience using Kanban. His post also highlights a fundamental principle of Scrum that the underlying process for software development cannot be mapped. This point is reinforced in an older post by Tobias Mayer, Scrum and Kanban - different animals, that was referenced by Alan Shalloway.

This reveals a truly fundamental difference between Scrum and Kanban that I missed in my post yesterday or more accurately between the Scrum community and the Kanban community. It’s not an accident that Tobias’ blog is called Agile Anarchy. The underlying assumption is that trying to map the creative process that produces software is futile and there is no point in trying. It simply has to be contained in a black box. Ken refers to this as a “container” in his post and that container is a Sprint. The Kanban community believes in a scientific approach and the use of models to understand the natural philosophy of what is at work in our universe. While we recognize that all models are wrong, we recognize the value in some models. A value-stream map is a model of a process, it is probably not an entirely accurate model, more an approximation. The question is whether it is useful or not?

Once we have that model, and can observe actual behavior against it, we can then use other models such as the Theory of Constraints, Theory of Profound Knowledge, Systems Thinking and Lean’s Waste (or the economic models of transaction and coordination costs), to analyze what is happening and suggest changes. We accept that these models are incomplete and that any suggested changes will not work in all circumstances. The question is whether they work often enough to be useful?

It seems to me that we have an overwhelming quantity of evidence that has been reported from firms large and small from all corners of the world at the Lean & Kanban 2009, UK Lean 2009, Lean & Kanban Exchange, Lean Software & Systems 2010 and much more to come at Lean & Kanban Europe 2010, and LESS 2010 later this year, to demonstrate that this scientific approach is working and genuinely helping organizations and teams improve both their economic performance and also the social capital of their organizations - resulting in a better sociological outcome for everyone involved.

[I’ve decided to update this post on June 12th following a private email from a Scrummaster who has been a lifelong believer in the anarchist ideal]

It appears that few practicing Scrum followers realize the underlying anarchist ideals held by the leadership of the community and designed into Scrum as a method. It appears that this Scrummaster sees Scrum as very prescriptive…

“I think of scrum as being a very strict system of prescribed practices that are imposed whether they fit your needs or not.”

and then provides an explanation of true anarchy as

“Anarchy means “no government”, and as practiced by modern anarchists,  is a system of total self regulation, living a life of personal responsibility, and the abstention from imposition of one’s own will onto others as happens with violence, oppressive social behavior (even aggressive driving) and voting.  It is closer to a religion in this way and it is more like perfect order than chaos.”

It appears that these ideals are not obvious in Scrum but I believe it is a fair assessment to characterize at least some of the leadership in the Scrum community as true anarchists. They believe in “no government”, “total self regulation”, “a life of personal responsibility”, and “abstention from imposition of one’s own will onto others.” This particular Scrummaster went on to say that…

“I can’t even tolerate a queue that is force ranked. Too command and control.”

And this highlights an incongruence in how Scrum is articulated, taught and practiced. Both Scrummaster and Product Owner training contain advice, guidance, and practices (belonging to the role) that are considered antithetical by a true anarchist.

The second issue that became obvious to me from this email exchange is that few people appear to understand my linking of the “use of models” and “science.” Perhaps this is a reflection of how poorly science is taught in our schools? So let me explain. Newton’s Law of Gravity is a model for a small part of the natural philosophy of the universe. It explains, in part, how things are attracted to each other and stick together, and why objects fall to earth. Newton’s Law of Gravity is known to be in inaccurate model. It only works at relatively large scale and has needed modified several times since Newton created it to accommodate concepts like distance from the center of gravity, varying levels of gravitational pull, and the other core forces of the Universe that were not known to Newton in his day. However, we need to ask whether Newton’s Law is useful or not despite its lack of completeness? The answer to this is surely “Yes!” for many common everyday commercial, scientific and military applications around planet Earth Newton’s Law is perfectly adequate. It is this pragmatic approach that is commonly held in the Kanban community. Models can be useful. They can allow us to make improvements even when they do not work in all circumstances. There are many in the Agile/Scrum communities who do not share this pragmatism and believe that in the absence of a complete model that defines the full natural philosophy of the domain that only an emergent solution based on empirical observation, experimentation and feedback is possible. The concept of predicting an outcome based on a scientific model is not acceptable nor does it exist within their paradigm. This can lead to discussions where individuals talk past each other. Kanban community folks using a scientific paradigm talking with Scrum advocates with an Edge of Chaos paradigm fail to comprehend what the other is saying. This pattern has happened frequently in the Kanbandev Yahoo! group when new folks arriving with a strong Scrum background try to understand Kanban by force fitting it to their existing mindset.

It appears that Scrum leaders like Ken and Tobias openly position Scrum as as a solution for Chaos, that values Anarchy and Revolution. While Lean and Kanban leaders like me, Alan Shalloway and Donald Reinertsen position Kanban and Lean as a scientific approach that approximates chaos as merely complicated or complex and delivers an Economic, Scientific and Evolutionary approach. This juxtaposition seems useful as a selection criteria for organizations. Do you wish to use a framework for change that tames chaos through anarchy and revolution, or a framework for change that models complexity incompletely but usefully and uses science to generate significant evolutionary economic and sociological improvement? (even if those improvements are theoretically less than optimal?) Choice is good! It is only right that one approach should not fit all and that you should have the best information available in order for you to make an informed choice that is appropriate for your business and organization. It’s been refreshing that folks like Ken and Tobias have published their thoughts on how Kanban differs from Scrum and we’ve been able to raise the quantity and quality of information available to the market.