Saturday, April 21, 2012

Lean Kanban Southern Europe Madrid 9-10 May

I’m proud to be the opening key note speaker at the first Lean Kanban Southern Europe Conference in Madrid, Spain next month. This small event is an attempt to emulate the first Lean Kanban conference in Miami in 2009 and catalyze the emergence of a strong community in Spain and Portugal. It’s a 2 day event with a single track of top quality international speakers the first day with 2 tracks on the 2nd day, one offering a full day of Spanish presentations with speakers from Spain, USA, Peru and Argentina. The pricing makes the event accessible for Spanish and Portuguese attendees in these tough economic times and makes this a truly low cost opportunity to learn Kanban and meet some of the leading practitioners from around Europe and further afield. There is still time to register. Pricing starts at 445 euros + VAT. Register now! Come enjoy Madrid and build your network of Limited WIP Society members

I’m particularly proud of the program we’ve put together for a smaller regional event. We’re working with the assumption that much of the audience will be new to Lean thinking in software product development and IT services and learning about Kanban for the first time. The first day is a single track designed to give attendees an overview and basic understanding of Kanban and how and where it is being used. This first day includes a presentation of the award winning Kanban implementation at BBVA by Atos Origin consultants, Oscar Garrido and Erika Weiss that earned them a Brickell Key Award nomination at the Lean Software & Systems Conference in Boston the following week.

The speaker lineup in Madrid is also very impressive as well as the quality of the businesses represented. Brickell Key award winner, David Joyce, on his way from Australia to Boston, will break his travel to give the 2nd key note. David is always an entertaining, informative speaker with beautiful presentations. As well as the BBVA case study from Spain, Angel Diaz, will present his experiences at ING Direct. Sticking with the financial industry, Eileen Shuter will tell the story of Vanguard, an American pensions firm, and their 3 year story of large scale Kanban adoption. From the media industry, we have Leopoldo Simini from Thomson Reuters in Argentina. Kevin Ryan will talk about portfolio level Kanban pioneered with the Financial Times. And at the other end of the scale, Nina Schwab from mobile search app startup, Tupalo in Vienna, will tell their Kanban story.

Explore the whole speaker line up for yourself. This is the truly unique opportunity to meet and share Lean and Kanban experience around Europe this spring. While a regional event, Greenlight PM have put together a high quality program and offer superb value for money. Don’t miss out. Register now! See you in Madrid!

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Lean Camp New England May 13th

One aspect of our Boston Lean Party, conference week next monththat I am particularly excited about is the full 1-day open space event that will be led by Jim Benson, Lean Camp New England. It’s available as a separate one day registration for $300. Lean Camp Registration

It has been evident from previous events that open space only works when it has a dedicated time slot on the program. This year we were restricted by venue availability to May 13-16th for the main conference. It is amazing how few venues there are in Boston for a conference of 300-450 people. Even planning more than one year in advance, we had limited choices available. When we settled on the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, we knew we would have Sunday, May 13th on the program. The question was, what to do with a Sunday?

The answer was create a one day open space event and make it available as a separate registration at an affordable price so that local enthusiasts for Agile methods, process improvement and Lean could come together with our elite world class invitation only speaker list and share their experiences peer-to-peer. And who better to put in charge of this than Jim Benson, the leader of the Personal Kanban movement, the founder of Lean Coffee, and organizer of the Seattle Lean Camp in 2011.

Lean Camp New England provides a unique opportunity to collaborate and share your Lean, Kanban and process improvement challenges with a truly global set of participants. Our event will feature participants from Europe, the Middle-East, South America and Australasia, together with Americans, Canadians and especially local enthusiasts from the Massachusetts and greater New England region. We can’t confirm any Asian or African participants at this time but who knows. Single day open space, “camp” events, tend to be local in nature. They help foster a community of peers but rarely is there the opportunity to integrate such an experienced set of global practitioners.

So register, come along to the World Trade Center Boston, its a spectacular venue with great views of the Boston waterfront, and make your own program - get the answers you need from the experts, and meet a whole new set of peers and turn them into long lasting friends. Lean Camp New England! The must attend event in May!

Attendees of the Lean Software & Systems Conference should insure that they also registered for Lean Camp. It may not be included in your registration.

To register visit http://lssc12.leanssc.org/ and make a date on May 13th.

Monday, April 09, 2012

Thoughts on #lssc12

The 2012 edition of our Lean Software & Systems Conference is almost upon us. I’m particularly proud of this year’s edition and the team who’ve worked hard to put it together. I thought I’d take a few minutes to reflect on why I’m referring to it as the Boston Lean Party and why I feel it will such a worthwhile gathering…

Register now! Use code DJAA200 through April 14th for the best available price.

Why Boston?

I decided to take the conference to Boston in 2012 as I felt that Lean approaches to managing software and systems engineering activities are coming of age. Boston (or more precisely, Cambridge, MA) is the academic home of Lean as we know it in the West. Boston is and has been the spiritual home of Lean Thinking for over 20 years. It was therefore time that we took our community, our thought leaders, our presentations and our anecdotal and empirical evidence to the home of Lean. It was time to underscore that Lean in knowledge work fields has to be about optimizing flow and not about waste elimination. And that counter-intuitive ideas like using kanban systems in knowledge work workflow actually enable kaizen cultures much better than an intuitive approach such as identifying non-value-adding activities performed by workers.

The Program

This year we’ve invited 3 key note speakers from outside the fields of software development and systems engineering. It was time to reach out and to further encourage the diversity and the cross-pollination that we’ve become well known for this past 3 years. So this year’s edition features Steven Spear, author of High Velocity Edge, that reports his findings from years of studying Toyota, Greg Howell, of the Lean Construction Institute who’s focus has been on building new hospitals faster and better, and from outside Lean altogether, Jochai Benkler, who’s book The Penguin and the Leviathan, looks at how to design better more cooperative human systems.

This year’s venue offers us a unique 500 seat amphitheater, so we decided to borrow another idea from the Agile conference and feature a main stage. The criteria for inclusion meant every speaker must have published a book on a relevant topic. in addition to our 3 key note speakers, our main stage will feature: Donald Reinertsen; Jim Sutton; Alan Shalloway; Michael Kennedy; Jim Benson; Hillel Glazer; Pujan Roka (another new face to this audience); Mary Poppendieck; and me. In itself the main stage is a major conference on Lean Software Development but there is more, a lot more…

Jeff Anderson from Deloitte is chairing a Learning Organizations track that features Steve Denning (Radical Management), Brant Cooper (Lean Startup), Joe Dager (Business 901) plus Jeff himself talking about how to synthesize ideas like Kanban, Lean Startup and Gamestorming.

David Joyce, Russell Healy and Benjamin Mitchell (always a good guy to stir things up a bit) are leading a 3-day Kanban track. This represents the largest Kanban conference ever held. Truly a conference within a conference. For the Kanban diehards a feast of new material and new faces from around the world.

Bob Charette will reprise his lead on the Risk track. Once again Bob has found a few new faces for us to enjoy. Troy Magennis revisits the conference but this time to talk about Monte Carlo simulation, while Brian Hagen looks at how to calculate the value of a Lean program. Mike Burrows will explain how Kanban moves risk upstream to places where it can better be managed.

And once again we make space for a pure play systems engineering track, this time with Richard Turner in the lead. Richard will be presenting some of his recent research into scheduling large scale systems engineering programs using kanban systems. Neil Siegel will look at the social context for large scale programs. Greg Yezersky is back to give us more on the General Theory of Innovation. Greg Parnell will look at identifying and measuring the value of Lean on large scale systems engineering projects. Mark McKinney looks at how to actively involve the end user in design and development of complex systems.

Lean Camp New England, May 13th

As if this were not enough, there is a full day of open space on Sunday May 13th, marketed separately as Lean Camp New England and 2 full days of tutorials also open to those who don’t attend the main conference.

Lean Action Kitchen and 2012 Brickell Key Awards

Jim Benson will also be demonstrating his culinary talents with Lean Action Kitchen (limited to 30 attendees). There will be the opening social gathering on Sunday May 13th and the gala banquet dinner for the presentation of the Brickell Key Awards. This year we have another outstanding set of nominees from around the world: Markus Andrezak; Jeff Anderson; Jim Benson; Oscar Garrido & Erika Weiss; Arne Roock; Yuval Yeret. The party after the dinner and awards will be open to all full conference attendees. Come along on the evening of May 15th and celebrate all the incredible contributions to our community.

Sponsors & Exhibit

This year we’ve seen the biggest, most positive response from sponsors to date. Software Engineering Professionals are back again as our stalwart backers, together with my own firm and Lean Kanban University taking the lead to promote accredited Kanban training. In purely alphabetical order I also need to thank Atlassian, Constant Contact, Deloitte, GBMP, Hansoft, Kanbanery, Kanbanpad, Lean Kit Kanban, Net Objectives, PMI, Rally, Swift Kanban, Target Process, Ultimate Software, and last but certainly not least as the one of only two sponsors to be with us all four years, Version One. This year’s exhibit area will be the biggest and best to date. I’m looking forward to a series of exciting product launches and updates from the many Kanban software vendors attending!

Look out also for the book table immediately outside the main stage entrance. This year it will feature the most extensive range of books from more than 10 of our speakers. It’s your chance to get your favorite books signed by the author. It will also be the first chance to purchase my new book, Lessons in Agile Managament being launched at the conference.

Organizing Team

This year’s event has been put together by a stellar team with Kelly Wilson leading on event planning with her team of Samantha Cotten, Amanda O’Rourke, Courtny Cotten, Lilian Nijboer and Janice Linden-Reed. Hillel Glazer led the program while Donna Cotton coordinated the Brickell Key Awards.

Venue

It’s the biggest! It’s the best! It’s the Boston Lean Party and it is taking place at the Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, May 13-18, 2012. Don’t miss out! Register now!

Sunday, March 04, 2012

Microsoft launches Beta of Kanban Guide

I’d like to bring to your attention the new Practical Kanban Guide from the Microsoft ALM Rangers. Adam Gilmore in the UK has led this effort but I believe it had many contributors.

While this template doesn’t really deliver the spirit of kaizen nor easily enable the a sequence of changes and improvements, it is a big start. It will go a long way to encouraging adoption of kanban systems and a service-oriented, service-delivery model for software development. Kanban systems do help control variation in flow (mura) and eliminate overburdening (muri, if WIP limits are set even vaguely correctly). So I really want to encourage Microsoft and encourage .Net users and MSDN members to consider adopting it. It’s a step in the right direction and as a community I’d like us to get behind it and encourage it.

Get full details!

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Who owns Kanban?

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.