Advanced Kanban Masterclass Seattle, WA - May 23-25, 2012
This 3-day masterclass for advanced Kanban practitioners, consultants, coaches, change agents and managers with pioneer of Kanban, David J. Anderson is limited to just 12 people.
Special guest, Bill Dettmer (author of five books about the Theory of Constraints), joins us Thursday.
This workshop is for anyone tasked with leading a change initiative in their organization or at a client organization in 2012. It is suitable for managers, process engineers, change agents, experienced Agile, Lean, or project management coaches and consultants. Existing Kanban practitioners with 1 year of experience, or those who have previously taken an accredited 2-day Kanban class and are actively using Kanban at work are welcome. Attendees are expected to be familiar with the content of the book, “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.
Kanban takes a cultural approach to capability, performance and organizational performance. These intensive 3 day workshops are intended to transfer the knowledge and skills to enable you to lead Lean transformations using the Kanban Method. This is your opportunity to get your hard questions answered by the founder of the method and to develop deep ties in the community and network with fellow practitioners. All attendees will receive an automatic invitation to the Kanban Leadership Retreat, 2-day open space conference being held in Mayrhofen, Austria, 21-22 June.
Don’t miss out! Read what others are saying about this workshop.
Register today!
$3500 per person
EARLY BIRD SPECIAL $2800 per person is automatically applied through May 10, 2012!
A copy of the book will be supplied upon registration. Attendees will maximize the value if they are already familiar with the material.
The intent is to have an interactive collaborative session designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. Attendees should come prepared to discuss their own experiences with Kanban and challenging situations they’ve faced with change initiatives at clients or employers
The workshop will open with a round table of introductions and shared Kanban experience. Each participant will be asked for a list of questions they’d like answered over the 3 day session and from this a topic backlog will be built. David will augment this backlog with essential topics and foundational material. The agenda for the remaining time will then be set to insure the fullest of coverage and the maximum value for all participants. The focus will be on shared experience and discussion of the hard questions that clients and team members ask coaches during the introduction of Lean ideas through the use of a kanban pull system. The workshop will include the use of the GetKanban game simulation and discussion of its value as a teaching aid.
The goal is to enable participants to go back into the field and successfully coach Agile/Lean transitions using the Kanban approach. Every workshop is different because of the unique experiences of each participant and their specific focus and desired outcomes. Each participant will received a personal recommendation from David J. Anderson as a result of participating in the class.
Kanban offers agile and project management coaches another tool in their transformation and coaching toolbox. Kanban is proving to be a facilitator of evolutionary change with low resistance and an enabler of accelerated high levels of organizational maturity.
Location: Seattle/Port Angeles, WA USA
Venue: Red Lion Inn
221 N. Lincoln
Port Angeles, WA 98362
Advanced Kanban Masterclass Hamburg Germany - May 30-Jun 1, 2012
This 3-day masterclass for advanced Kanban practitioners, consultants, coaches, change agents and managers with pioneer of Kanban, David J. Anderson is limited to just 12 people.
This workshop is for anyone tasked with leading a change initiative in their organization or at a client organization in 2012. It is suitable for managers, process engineers, change agents, experienced Agile, Lean, or project management coaches and consultants, existing Kanban practitioners with 1 year of experience, and those who have previously taken an accredited 2-day Kanban class and are actively using Kanban at work. Attendees are expected to be familiar with the content of the book, “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business.
Kanban takes a cultural approach to capability, performance and organizational performance. These intensive 3 day workshops are intended to transfer the knowledge and skills to enable you to lead Lean transformations using the Kanban Method. This is your opportunity to get your hard questions answered by the founder of the method and to develop deep ties in the community and network with fellow practitioners. All attendees will receive an automatic invitation to the Kanban Leadership Retreat, 2-day open space conference being held in Mayrhofen, Austria, 21-22 June.
Don’t miss out! Read what others are saying about this workshop.
A copy of the book will be supplied upon registration. Attendees will maximize the value if they are already familiar with the material.
The intent is to have an interactive collaborative session designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. Attendees should come prepared to discuss their own experiences with Kanban and challenging situations they’ve faced with change initiatives at clients or employers
The workshop will open with a round table of introductions and shared Kanban experience. Each participant will be asked for a list of questions they’d like answered over the 3 day session and from this a topic backlog will be built. David will augment this backlog with essential topics and foundational material. The agenda for the remaining time will then be set to insure the fullest of coverage and the maximum value for all participants. The focus will be on shared experience and discussion of the hard questions that clients and team members ask coaches during the introduction of Lean ideas through the use of a kanban pull system. The workshop will include the use of the GetKanban game simulation and discussion of its value as a teaching aid.
The goal is to enable participants to go back into the field and successfully coach Agile/Lean transitions using the Kanban approach. Every workshop is different because of the unique experiences of each participant and their specific focus and desired outcomes. Each participant will received a personal recommendation from David J. Anderson as a result of participating in the class.
Kanban offers agile and project management coaches another tool in their transformation and coaching toolbox. Kanban is proving to be a facilitator of evolutionary change with low resistance and an enabler of accelerated high levels of organizational maturity.
With the launch of the Lean Kanban University accredited Kanban training program there has been some commentary questioning whether I and LKU have the right to assert ourselves with such authority. These issues are worth addressing. The questioners suggest whether I invented Kanban or own it and if not then what gives LKU legitimacy to trade as we intend to do, offering standardized accredited training delivered by accredited trainers? While these questions are coming from outside the community and it would be easy to dismiss them as coming from disgruntled people with an axe to grind or sour grapes to squash, I believe the questions are worth addressing.
Origination
The Kanban Method as we know it today emerged as a process in the software engineering department I managed in 2007. No one person invented it. Instead I created an environment where people were empowered to be creative, innovative and to do the right thing for our various stakeholders. I had previously coached the application of the use of a virtual kanban system on a software maintenance team and that was a starting point. However, the Kanban Method as we know it today with its classes of service and SLAs, its metrics, its visualizations, and many patterns that have emerged for dealing with common project or process challenges, largely emerged in 2007 in an office on 2nd Avenue in downtown Seattle.
My job has been to document it, to analyze and understand it, to put theory behind it, to articulate it, and to evangelize it. By identifying the theory and the patterns I’ve been able to communicate the Kanban Method in ways that others have managed to copy and to reproduce similar sorts of results - often better results.
The theory, the writing, the principles, and the definition of the method are my intellectual property. I’ve chosen to share that information and knowledge widely and to encourage others not only to use it free of charge but to innovate on it and extend it.
In 2008, my colleagues at the time, Jim Benson and Corey Ladas, started to use Kanban to help them manage their own work in our office on the west side of Lake Union in Seattle. I didn’t see a lot of this innovation as I was traveling to clients most of the time. By early 2009, Jim Benson and I had recognized that this variant of Kanban for personal or small team use, to help them manage their immediate tasks, had evolved and was different from the organization level change method my team had developed in 2007. While we’d heard of others innovating in similar ways, for example, one of the team at IPC Media in London reported using Kanban for a home project to build a kit car, it was Jim Benson who categorized, classified and described Personal Kanban. This is his work and intellectual property and he has shared it widely and freely with people around the world.
The real value has been in giving the community two methods which have been articulated and described in a fashion that others can learn them and repeat their use. I would not claim to have invented Kanban but I did pioneer its use and I did create the environment for it to develop fully. Beyond that not only did I document it but I developed the underlying theory, principles and identified the core practices that make it work. Jim Benson did the same for Personal Kanban.
So invention is not the issue. It has, however, to be recognized that we did define and describe these methods and that those definition and descriptions are our intellectual property.
Community
Starting in August 2007 working with a small core of enthusiasts I have built up the Kanban community globally. Many actions and risks have been taken to enable this community to grow. I’ve visited countries around the world often where there was little or no commercial case for doing so, other than to envangelize Kanban and to help people and businesses by encouraging adoption. Today that community is numbered in the thousands on 5 continents. We have local meetup Limited WIP Society groups in many countries meeting regularly to share their experiences with Kanban. In 2012, we will host 6 conferences across 2 continents to provide a meeting and sharing place for that community.
With Personal Kanban, Jim Benson has done something similar. The community features many of the same people but also others from other walks of life such as school teachers. The meetups are called Lean Coffee where a meeting format has been adopted of using a personal kanban on the coffee table to facilitate the meeting. Jim has also organized events such as the Seattle Lean Camp in summer last year. These community events serve as opportunities for people to get to know each other and share experiences and learn from each other.
Organizations have been formed. The first was the Lean Software & Systems Consortium and more recently Lean Kanban University. I’ve played a particularly strong role in creating and running both of these.
Both Jim and I have showed significant leadership in creating and fostering healthy communities to encourage learning, knowledge sharing and information dissemination. And the community rewards us by reporting success stories and by continuing to innovate and synthesize other ideas.
Ownership and Leadership
I don’t claim any ownership in the idea of adapting kanban systems to software development. The idea was suggested by Donald Reinertsen. I do, however, claim copyright in my own writing and intellectual property. I did create the definition of the Kanban Method and document it such that others could learn from it. The concepts and ideas are freely available and I encourage the community to take them and expand and innovate on them. Others have already done so and have created their own intellectual property. Corey Ladas, Henrik Kniberg and Mattias Skarin have already produced books. These are their intellectual property. Laurent Morisseau and Klaus Leopold both have Kanban books ready to be published. And once again these works will be their own intellectual property. No one pays royalties or licences to expand on the ideas in Kanban so long as their writings are original.
Similarly Jim Benson claims ownership to his Personal Kanban book but the ideas are freely available for the community to expand upon.
Both Jim and I have shown leadership in forming and fostering the community with the help of many others over the last 5 years. We’ve assisted many people to develop knowledge of Kanban and provided places for the community to meet such that people get to know each other and share experiences and knowledge. As such within the community the members know who to recommend and have a good idea of the skills, capabilities and experience of others. Leadership confers a responsibility to use that position wisely.
Recently, I’ve handed over the formal definition of the Kanban Method to Lean Kanban University. LKU will maintain a standard set of definitions and a standard teaching curriculum. The staff, management board and advisory board of LKU will have an influence on the evolution of the definition of the Kanban Method with input from the community and observation of techniques used in the field. It may yet fall to others to write the next chapter in the future of Kanban but somehow I believe that I will have a role to play. I will write more books and again those works will be my intellectual property. Hence, the issue of ownership is always going to be a murky one.My observation is that those who find the need to ask the question are generally on the outside. Those within the community feel a shared ownership of the ideas.
Because LKU contains many of the leaders in the Kanban community and I expect that the next round of membership will only strengthen that claim significantly, authority is conferred on LKU by its membership that constitute it and its governing mechanisms such as the advisory board. The community confers authority on LKU so long as it has respect for LKU’s actions and the members that make it up. LKU is in and of itself a leader and its authority is conferred from the community in respect of that leadership.
References and Acknowledgement
Those of you familiar with the Kanban book will know that I reference and credited similar looking work by Arlo Belshee, Jim Shore, Kenji Hiranabe, Joshua Kerievsky and others. Doing so was a professional courtesy but also by acknowledging others doing similar work, it strengthens the arguments for adopting Kanban. Similar work isn’t a threat it is a strength.
The Kanban community has many healthy traits such as encouraging innovation, embracing people with different and unfamiliar ideas and encouraging the synthesis of more and more outside concepts and methods. There is a also a healthy respect for the scientific method, for study and inquiry and in the collection of data to show tangible results. I’d like to add that our community should be generous in its references and acknowledgements. Whenever we find examples of others doing similar work or of past work that perhaps was not well known or didn’t catch on, it strengthens our case by acknowledging it.
Recently, I chose to add a section on A3 processes to an article on Lean Software Development published by Microsoft. I did this to acknowledge that others have shown success in developing continuous improvement in organizations in other ways than by visualizing workflow and applying a virtual kanban system (The Kanban Method). Doing so does not weaken Kanban. Instead it strengthens our community and broadens it.
Summary
Specific works about the Kanban Method and its usage are the intellectual property of their respective authors. The Kanban Method itself was not invented or designed by anyone. Instead it emerged in an organization, where I as a manager and leader had created a culture for it to do so. My job was to understand what had happened and write it down in a way that others could repeat it. The evidence appears to suggest that I did this effectively.
Adapting the Kanban Method for personal use started in 2008 in various places around the world. The person who captured it and defined it as a method that others could repeat was Jim Benson. Again, I don’t think any one person can claim to have invented Personal Kanban. Instead it emerged as a natural evolution from use in software development organizations.
The definition of the Kanban Method is now controlled by LKU. It is likely that LKU will continue to adopt ideas that emerge from the community and it is also likely that a significant amount of Kanban innovation for the foreseeable future will continue to come from me. This is partly because I have a large back catalog of unpublished material which would appear new to an outsider.
Referencing and acknowledging other similar work and alternative methods to achieve similar outcomes is to be encouraged. It strengths the case for Kanban and grows and strengthens the community.
18 Firms Join Together to put Standards into Kanban Training
I’ve been on vacation this past week skiing with my children. Some very rare quality time with my family. I managed to stay offline almost all week and I was absent for what I believe is a remarkable business achievement. 18 firms joined together to form the Lean Kanban University Accredited Kanban Training program.
Many Kanban community members may have noticed a strange anomaly in the force two weeks ago as the center of gravity in the Kanban universe moved to the Hilton Royal Parc hotel in Soestduinen in Netherlands for 3 days. There 14 of the 18 founding companies came together, 20 people in total, to ratify the governing charter of the new program. I believe that the launch of a new standard with so many participating businesses and from 10 countries and 3 continents is really unprecedented in the software engineering or project management process space in the last 3 or 4 decades. With a really diverse set of opinions, it is amazing that we managed to come to an agreement and keep all 18 companies on-board for the launch.
History
The Lean Kanban University web site has been around since spring 2011. It is a joint venture company owned by Alan Shalloway’s Net Objectives and my own firm. It started as a simple portal to good quality Kanban content and as an event listing site for firms listing Lean and Kanban training. In this sense, it was providing similar functionality to Agile University or Agile Sherpa but focused specifically on the Lean Software Development and Kanban markets.
During our 2-day open space Kanban Leadership Retreat event in Iceland in June last year, it became evident that providers of good quality Kanban training were becoming concerned with how to address the needs of an expanding market. These clients were from bigger corporates and behaved like early majority market players, looking for signals of maturity such as standards and quality assurance as well as a way of tracking accomplishment and status within the field of Kanban. At the same time other our success in growing adoption of Kanban was enticing new players into the market offering Kanban training and other materials. Often we’d never heard of these people. They took no involvement in the community and they appeared to be fairly ignorant of concepts that we consider basic, fundamental or foundational to Kanban. There was a new and growing need to establish some quality assurance and standards in the market and to differentiate genuinely good Kanban training and trainers and firms who are committed to developing the Kanban community as a service to a wider market from those who were simply in it to make a quick buck from customers incapable of discerning quality and capability. In this sense I’m talking about corporate purchasing departments and human resource training officers asked to “get Kanban training” and looking to pay the lowest possible price.
So the roots of the new accredited Kanban training program began in Reykjavik, Iceland in June.
Development
Throughout the fall Mike Burrows and Dan Vacanti worked to bring the program together and invites went out attendees at Reykjavik and other business partners. 16 firms joined Net Objectives and David J. Anderson & Associates as charter members and proceeded to work on the governing charter.
12th to 14th February representatives of these firms met to ratify the charter and agree the governing structure of the program. The main power lies with the Advisory Board of 18 firms to be augmented later with 2 more non-charter members that will be elected from the 2nd round of joining firms. The charter lays out the rules for membership of the program and puts some controls around curriculum, accreditation of training materials, accreditation of new trainers, and the criteria for new joining member companies. The charter is available for review by any firm that makes a genuine application to join to the program. The program is open to new member firms and if you are currently offering Kanban training, we would encourage you to apply to join.
Mike Burrows has worked with the charter members to agree a standard curriculum for 2-day training in the Kanban Method
What next?
Janice Linden-Reed is now working hard to update the web site and provide the functionality we need to move the program forward. This will take some time. We anticipate incremental updates to the site over the next few months. The Advisory Board plan to meet again at the Lean Software & Systems Conference in Boston in May and at the Kanban Leadership Retreat in Austria in June. Expect further announcements at that time.
Meanwhile, training materials from many of the member firms are now being accredited against the standard curriculum and those members are beginning to advertise accredited training classes. In order for a class to be accredited by LKU, it must be given by a member firm in good standing, by an accredited trainer and using an accredited training class with materials that have been certified to meet the requirements of the standard curriculum. We intend to post the curriculum publicly. As updates to the web site are happening as fast as we can make them, it is likely that the curriculum will not be publicly available until the Boston conference in May.
What does this make Lean Kanban University now?
At one level LKU is a standards body. At this time is has defined only one standard, the curriculum for a 2-day class in the Kanban method. We may choose to create additional programs and define additional standards in future. We have loosely discussed standards for Kanban tracking software and standards for games and simulations as well as standards for metrics and an agreed dictionary or glossary of terms. All of these things may help improve quality in communicating and using Kanban. They may also provide additional signals that more conservative mainstream market adopters are looking for. Standards provide reassurance. Our approach with standards is always to define a minimal core and to allow each individual member firm to innovate and differentiate their own offerings.
LKU is also an open, global, corporate university. It is not trying to be an academic institution offering doctorate level degrees. Instead it is modeled on corporate universities such as those at McDonald’s, Disney and Toyota and on consortia of training firms where they seek to offer similar training to similar standards around the world. LKU will define curriculum and publish those publicly. It will also use the gravitas of its membership, incorporating the throught leaders, intellectual property creators, and pioneers of Kanban in the field of knowledge work and service industries, to assure the quality and appropriateness of corporate training in the Kanban Method.
There are currently no plans to create an academic institution though a research program involving academic institutions may be possible in future.
What does LKU mean for me?
LKU offers you reassurance of good quality Kanban training. On completing an accredited two day class, you will be invited to become a member of the LKU web site. LKU will store a record of all your training, who the trainer was ,when you took the class and where, and you will be able to download certificates showing completion of accredited classes. These certificates will be co-branded with the logo of the training company and LKU. Over time, additional member benefits may be available.
LKU is not offering an end-user certification at this time. You do not become certified in Kanban by taking an accredited 2-day class. A certification scheme that would involve an examination is under review by the advisory board. It is likely that experienced academics will be invited to become involved in LKU if a decision is made to proceed with a certification scheme. In the event that this should happen LKU would then become an examination body in addition to its role as a standard body and quality assurance organization for Kanban training.
Closing Thoughts
Having been previously involved in the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and more recently Lean Software & Systems Consortium, I am incredibly proud that we’ve been able to get the Accredited Kanban Training Program off the ground via LKU and its 18 member companies. I really believe that this organization has legs, has been established with a governance structure and charter that will give it longevity, and that we will be able to help a lot of people and a lot of businesses through LKU over the coming decades.
By Dominica DeGrandis
It is fun to discover articles sprinkled with Kanban properties, even though they don’t specifically mention Kanban. I stumbled across several good ones this week.
Having worked for their competitor for many years, I find this list of principles from Getty Images very interesting. They flow, they pull, they stop the line, they optimize the whole, etc… It sounds too good to be true. http://blog.gettyimages.com/2012/01/17/from-our-lean-and-agile-dev-team/
Disclosure - this article isn’t really about Kanban, but “What’s in Store for 2012: A Few Predictions” offers all around good insights for us. In particular, the value of software will continue to decline as open source contributions continues to rise and bring an overload of choices – perhaps too many. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2012/01/13/2012-predictions/
