Devops is related to bringing Development and Operations closer together.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Kanban Weekly Roundup - Apr 4, 2012
By Dominica DeGrandis
From Devops to conferences to new kanban books, this issue includes a little something for everyone.
We search for new content every week. If you read or write something you consider useful for the kanban community, please drop us a line and we’ll include it.
David Anderson’s next book is in pre-production, but it’s not the advanced kanban book we’ve been waiting for. Rumor has it, we may see it at lssc12 in Boston (see below for details).
There is going to be a DevOps & Kanban meetup the evening of March 22 near Mountain View, CA. It’s free! I’ll be there along with some leaders from the Devops community. Check out the attendee list!
Here’s a post suggesting we take a long hard look at Intangibles (maintenance type work). Titled “Intangibles Matter” Mike Burrows conveys, “The worst risk of all might be to underestimate them [intangibles].” http://positiveincline.com/index.php/2012/02/intangibles-revisited/
Kanban for Devops seeks to optimize the whole of the organization. From business requests to IT delivery, we discover how to help work flow across different functional teams. Devops is about respect, cooperation and trust among individual practitioners and leadership. With Kanban, we look at how using a service-delivery approach can help unify teams and promote cross-functional collaboration.
This 2-day workshop introduces how the Kanban Method can help Ops teams balance demand against their capability to deliver. We begin by studying the demand on your team, department or organization and learn how to gather data to understand the capability of your system and how it operates. Discussions and interactive exercises on the Kanban Method will address the following topics:
- Specialization and bottlenecks
- Dependencies on external groups
- Interlude from never-ending work
- Early input mechanisms
- Variable task size
- Interrupt driven work
We will also look at ways to manage risks related to the increasing complexity around software delivery and support. Attendees play the “Kanban for Ops” version of the GetKanban game.
Working in small teams, class attendees will analyze and design a Kanban system that they can bring back to the organization to implement right away.
Based on David J. Anderson’s book “Kanban - Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business”, attendees of the class will receive a copy of the book.
Class Schedule
Day 1
Kanban Mechanics
- Demand Analysis
- Workflow Mapping
- Visualization
- Work Item Types
- Work-in-progress Limits
- Classes of Service
- Kanban Simulation Game
Day 2
Kanban Progression
- Kanban System design
- Operations Review
- Case Studies
- Risk Management
- Metrics
- Service Level Agreements (SLA)
- Variability and predictability
- How to Get Started with Kanban
Is this for you?
This training provides a useful perspective for improving work done on the periphery of software development. If ever-more frequent deliveries from software development are increasing pressure on your teams and creating bottlenecks in the delivery process, look at Kanban to extend agility and balance to IT services and operations teams. From Data Administrative Services to Deployment & Release Managers to Help Desk, this class covers beginning to intermediate level material.
Register today!
$1200 per person.
About the presenter
Dominica specializes in Kanban for IT Services and Operations - with teams interacting with software development. She spent her first 15 years in software engineering deeply embedded in Development teams performing builds, deployments and environment maintenance. She has worked in organizations of all sizes, from the US Army, Boeing, and AT&T to small start-ups. Dominica first worked for David Anderson at Corbis in 2006 where she helped deliver the first implementation of Kanban for software engineering in the US. Adept at leading teams performing Configuration Management and Release Management, Dominica found a passion for improving the way development and operations teams work together. Dominica holds a BS in Information Computer Sciences from the University of Hawaii. She can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow her on twitter at @dominicad.
Location:
Sunnyvale, CA, USA
Venue:
Silicon Valley Cloud Center
222 Caspian Dr.
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
A short list this week, but a powerful concept - we look at the benefit of team metrics vs. Individual metrics.
There will be an interlude with the Kanban Weekly Roundup next week - I will be in Budapest co-training a class with David Anderson. David will be covering Kanban for Software Engineering and I will be speaking on Kanban for IT Operations.
News
This post on the benefit of team metrics affirms my strong belief for looking at results from the whole organization versus individuals. Vin D’Amico (@BrainsLink) states is well,” teams deliver successful enterprise outcomes, not individuals”. If you read my Devops article, you know that I’m a strong proponent of finding common goals across development and operations teams. While establishing team-based metrics is a vast improvement over individual metrics (and individual merit reviews), bumping metrics up to the organizational level can lead to optimizing organization wide results. http://brainslink.com/2012/02/to-be-agile-establish-team-metrics-not-individual-ones/
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/
