Thursday, November 01, 2007

Kanban Warranty Claims Processing

Tom Hopper has implemented a kanban board for processing warranty claims following his attendance at the Lean New Product Development Summit in Chicago earlier this year.

Related posts: Lean NPD Summit Report

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Javapolis Sessions

Here are the full abstracts for my two official Javapolis conference sessions…

UNI: (Monday 10 December) The Zen of Agile Management

What is the essence of agile management? How do you create a culture of continuous improvement? With light touch, empowerment, delegation, high levels of trust, and focus on the correct leverage point to drive maximum advantage. Learn the Zen of agile management! A set of techniques developed by David J. Anderson over the last 8 years through his experience managing teams at Fortune 100 companies such as Motorola and Sprint using Feature Driven Development, Microsoft Solutions Framework (and Team Foundation Server) and his latest work at Corbis using Lean ideas such as kanban. This half-day workshop dives into the heart of how to manage with queues using kanban boards, cumulative flow diagrams and application of wider ideas in management science, to software development process. Through David’s experience as senior director of the software engineering function at Bill Gates’ private company, Corbis, you will learn how to scale Agile and Lean techniques enterprise-wide.

CONF: (Friday 14 December) A Kanban System for Software Engineering

Ideas from Lean Thinking have been growing in popularity with the Agile software development community. Over the past year, the use of kanban (literally signal cards) popular in manufacturing has been seen as the significant innovation in managing agile work and is growing in adoption at firms such as Yahoo! David Anderson introduced the first electronic kanban system at Microsoft in 2004 and has since extended the technique through his work at Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer. Kanban innovates on accepted agile management practice by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence. It helps achieve a balance of demand against capacity on the team and eliminate multi-tasking. David will present a brief history of the technique through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. The kanban system enables David to deliver on his Recipe for Success: focus on quality; reduce work-in-progress; balance demand against throughput; and prioritize. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Javapolis, Kanban, Software+Engineering

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Some other kanban activity

Scott Miller has been blogging about using kanban board in software development and how he went about designing his board.

Meanwhile, Business Lean blog has some advice on the trade off between an electronic kanban system versus a manual system. As many of you know I addressed these issues myself with the Sticky Buddy scheme and the Digital White Board. Technorati tag: Agile, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Lean, Kanban

Monday, September 03, 2007

Lean Scales Differently than Agile

Corey Ladas posts his thoughts on how a kanban development team daily standup operates differently than a Scrum team standup and why it scales to a larger number of people and can still finish in 15 minutes (and most usually much less).

Corey and I have been talking about this phenomena for a while. The standup meetings on my team last 5 to 10 minutes typically but often involve 20 or more people. For example, our sustaining work processing change requests across any of our diverse IT systems attracts analysts, developers, testers, build engineers, project managers, functional managers and business owners. It’s common to see 20+ people at the standup at 9.45am every morning. On one of our major projects, as Corey mentions, up to 40 people attend the standup meeting because the kanban board is showing work-in-process that interests them or that they are directly responsible for. Despite these large numbers of attendees the meetings are over in as little as 10 minutes. How is that possible?

The main difference is that with a kanban system, the team enumerates over the work-in-process kanban cards, orchestrated by the functional manager leading the meeting. Most of the WIP doesn’t need comment. As Corey says, only the special cause variations, i.e. project issues, generally need comment. And when comments are needed only 1 or 2 people need speak. The whole team manages to keep up with what is going on by simply observing the kanban board and listening to the updates on issues blocking flow.

With one of our major projects, we are running feature squads (a slight variant on an FDD Feature Team or a Microsoft Feature Crew.) In a Scrum style process, each of these teams would hold there own scrum (daily standup) and would send a representative to the scrum of scrums to update the whole project. With our kanban system we are able to do all of this with just one sub-15 minute meeting with everyone present - a flat structure, no hierarchy, no additional overhead. Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Corey+Ladas

Monday, August 27, 2007

Kanban is Catching On

Since launching the kanban Yahoo! group last week its acquired members 80 members in only a few days. The idea seems to be catching on. Meanwhile, Kenji Hiranabe who attended my CWAC session at Agile 2007 has published a paper on kanban boards in software development. Its great to see other people talking about and writing about how to implement pull systems for software development. If you know of other work or other people doing this stuff please leave a comment. Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Kenji+Hiranabe, David+Anderson