http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/index/ David J Anderson thoughts on Kanban Lean and Agile Management en janice@kanban101.com Copyright 2010 2010-08-25T04:44:44+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/lean_amp_kanban_europe_conference/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/lean_amp_kanban_europe_conference/#When:04:44:44Z 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! Kanban, Lean, LimitedWIPSociety 2010-08-25T04:44:44+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/announcing_lean_software_amp_systems_2011/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/announcing_lean_software_amp_systems_2011/#When:20:46:48Z 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. Kanban, Lean, LimitedWIPSociety, LSSC 2010-08-24T20:46:48+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/dzone_refcard_update/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/dzone_refcard_update/#When:21:01:36Z 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. Kanban, Lean 2010-08-04T21:01:36+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/problems_with_dzone_refcard/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/problems_with_dzone_refcard/#When:15:29:34Z [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. Kanban, Lean 2010-08-02T15:29:34+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/phil_sept/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/phil_sept/#When:17:48:22Z These intensive 3 day workshops are intended to transfer the knowledge and skills to existing Agile, process and project management coaches consultants, to lead Lean transformations using kanban systems. The 2010 inclusive price for this workshop is $3000! Don’t miss out! Read what others are saying about this workshop. - Rachel Davies, Kanban Coaching Insights - Karen Graves, Kanban Evolution - Armond Mehrabian, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Register today. Great value at $3000 USD per person… This event is SOLD OUT. Click here to request to be put on the waiting list This workshop is for experienced Agile or project management coaches, existing Kanban practitioners with 1 year of experience, and those who have previously taken David J. Anderson’s Kanban class and are actively using Kanban at work. This workshop is intended to be an interactive collaborative session designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. 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 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. For more details download the PDF flyer Location: Hilton Philadelphia City Avenue, Philadelphia, PA, USA Events 2010-07-11T17:48:22+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/a_couple_of_others_thoughts_on_scrum_compared_to_kanban/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/a_couple_of_others_thoughts_on_scrum_compared_to_kanban/#When:00:19:33Z 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. Kanban, Lean, LimitedWIPSociety, Reinertsen, Schwaber, Scrum, Scrumban 2010-06-12T00:19:33+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/thoughts_on_how_kanban_differs_from_scrum/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/thoughts_on_how_kanban_differs_from_scrum/#When:05:23:16Z I’ve largely stayed out of the debate comparing Scrum to Kanban or those wishing to position the techniques as rivals. I’ve actively encouraged Mattias Skarin and Henrik Kniberg who have done a very good job analyzing and comparing in their book Scrum and Kanban making the best of both! I feel that I can add some insights that Henrik and Mattias didn’t cover - insights that have emerged while I’ve been touring the world this past nine months working with teams and agile coaches on 5 continents from small innovative startup firms to some of the world’s largest industrial and technology businesses. At one level Scrum is presented as quite a prescriptive project management process - Sprints, Scrums, Sprint Planning, Retrospectives, Demos etc etc. The leadership of the Scrum community is anxious to point out that Scrum is much more than this - it is a framework for provoking change and emergent behavior in organizations. Kanban is not a project management or software development lifecycle method. It is an approach to change management - a framework for catalyzing change in an organization. So it differs from Scrum in that it cannot be used as a process to get work done. It needs to be applied to an existing process. That existing process can be Scrum, or equally any other lifecycle method with which you are familiar, or something that has no name - an ad hoc process. However, as a framework for change Kanban and Scrum can be compared as alternatives. It is in this area, as frameworks for change, that I feel I can add to the existing literature as Kniberg & Skarin did not address this aspect. Change Catalyst Kanban uses the WIP limit as its control mechanism to provoke conversations about change. Failure to respect the WIP limits and discuss problems will lead to stagnation and a failure to improve. Improvement discussions are objective as the visualization, measurement, explicitness of policies and the models from Lean, Theory of Constraints and the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, allow a team to scientifically analyze their problems and propose solutions. Scrum uses commitment as its control mechanism for provoking changes. Commitment exists at two levels: at the personal daily level - this is reinforced with the Scrum and the 3 questions “what did you do for us yesterday?” “what will you do for us today?” and “Is anything impeding you from meeting your commitment today?”; the second commitment is at the team level, the Sprint commitment, a promise to deliver something on a certain date. Failure to meet a commitment should lead to a discussion about the failure that should provoke a process improvement. While we could debate the effectiveness of this approach, let’s accept that it works. So Kanban uses a WIP limit as a change agent and Scrum uses commitments. This is a fundamental difference in approach. Evolution rather than Revolution Ken Schwaber has talked about the “hard words of Scrum” such as Scrum, Scrummaster, Sprint, and so forth. Scrum is intended to be shock treatment for an organization. It often involves people taking on new job titles, new roles and responsibilities and it is generally introduced in managed fashion with training and a defined date to switch to the new approach. Introducing Scrum represents a revolution. It shakes up the social hierarchy of an organization and affects (both negatively and positively) the professional self-esteem and egos of team members. Not every project manager values being told they need to retrain and assume a new job title! For some organizations this will be the right approach - they need shock treatment to avoid disaster. For others, all it does is raise emotional resistance amongst the workforce and encourage passive aggressive behavior. Kanban is designed as the antithesis of the Scrum approach to change. With Kanban you start with the process you have now. You “kanbanize” it by mapping the value-stream, visualizing it, and limiting work-in-progress to create a pull system. You leave existing roles, responsibilities, job titles and practices intact. The only changes are to the interface with upstream and downstream partners, such as business owners and systems operations. Any changes made here are specifically chosen to avoid shaking up the social hierarchy or invoke an emotionally defensive response from affected people. Kanban provokes evolutionary change. Initially this means process optimization - Kaizen - but gradually as the organization matures in capability it leads to larger managed changes - Kaikaku. It has been observed that progressive kaizen events lead to improved organizational maturity and capability enabling more dramatic kaikaku level changes. So Scrum is introduced in a diametrically opposed fashion to Kanban. Kanban is softly softly and Scrum is hard shock treatment! Conformance to Process While Scrum is advertised as a starting point and a framework that will provoke change, there has been a growing market in practice-based conformance and assessments. The best known of these, endorsed by Jeff Sutherland is referred to as the Nokia Test. These tests determine whether you team is following Scrum. If not then the team is said to be “Scrum-But” and Ken Schwaber has taken to calling practitioners of non-conformant Scrum by the insidious term “Scrum-Butt"s. The effect of these conformance tests is to discourage innovation and deviation from textbook definitions. The net effect is confusion as on the one hand the leadership of the community tells practitioners that Scrum is about catalyzing emergent behavior in their organizations, while the same leadership prescribes a test that is designed to punish those who deviate from a standard definition. Kanban is designed as an approach that will customize and evolve an existing process regardless of what that existing process is at the start. It is therefore impossible to define a conformance test for Kanban. Kanban uses 5 seed properties to catalyze the emergent behavior of process evolution. These 5 properties are: Visualize the Workflow; Limit Work-in-Progress; Measure Flow; Make Process Policies Explicit; Use Models to Evaluate Improvement Opportunities. These represent the 5 practices that must be present for the Kanban approach to change to work. The team’s process for software development and project management will always be unique and over time will be tailored and optimized to the value-stream, risk profile, skills and capabilities of the team, customer demand, bottlenecks and sources of variability that affect the team. There can be no test for conformance. Any measurement that might apply should measure whether a better economic and sociological outcome was affected by the introduction of the Kanban approach. Containers versus Whole System There are a number of other properties that emerge with teams using Kanban that differ from practices of teams doing Scrum. These emergent differences are mostly a side-effect of not pursuing the “Container” approach of Scrum. Scrum uses a container known as a Sprint that time-boxes a batch of development work and discourages interference from outside. Ideally there should be no interference. Scrum seeks, like good software architecture, to minimize the interfaces from the container, to achieve a loose coupling. The desired effect is to make the activity within the container - the Sprint development - as predictable as possible, in order to meet the Sprint Commitment. Kanban does not introduce such a container, instead it encourages a whole system view. A number of mechanisms simplify the coordination of elements in the whole system. For example, the combination of visualization and a WIP limited pull system enable a very simple interface with business owners. As a result most organizations adopting Kanban do not need the single Product Owner concept of Scrum and can easily cope with multiple competing business owners attending queue replenishment meetings. Kanban daily standup meetings have been shown to be effective with up to 50 or more people. The reason for this is that the team are implicitly trusted to be doing the work that is shown in the visualization of the workflow. There is no need to use the standup to reinforce personal commitment and hence the standup can focus on the work and not the people. Teams will iterate over the work tickets rather than through the team members. The three questions are obviated. More mature Kanban teams reduce discussion only to work that is impeded or defective, focusing only on exceptions rather than work that is proceeding normally. Organizations using Kanban have also been observed to merge smaller teams to take advantage of the reduced coordination costs and better utilize their labor pool. It’s become common to see teams of 20 to 30 and sometimes up to 50 being created often from multiple (former) Scrum teams, or from a mix of Scrum and non-agile teams. The workflow visualization often involves multiple rows (or swimlanes) to represent different streams of development. Some team members may be assigned to a swimlane as permanent team members, accountable and responsible for work in that lane, while others are allowed to float across lanes to provide staff augmentation or specialist skills. The result is more effective and efficient use of the available people, resulting in more throughput and shorter lead times. Closing Thoughts I believe that we are only beginning to understand the differences between Scrum and Kanban. I believe that as more emergent properties of Kanban organizations are observed as recurring patterns in the field, we will grow in our understanding. Kanban differs from Scrum. Where we are still learning is how introduction of Kanban to an organization using Scrum changes that organization, its culture and its approach. I believe that Kanban is compatible with the mechanics of Scrum. It is compatible with Scrum, the project management method. Adding WIP and visualization to Scrum will help improve Sprint Commitment effectiveness. However, it is also introducing the WIP limit as a mechanism to catalyze incremental changes. Scrum teams adopting this approach are said to be Scrumban teams. The WIP limit obviates the need for commitment to drive change, reduces any dysfunctional reliance on heroic effort, and improves overall systems thinking when considering potential improvements. Scrumban will replace the Scrum philosophy and framework with the Kanban approach. It may still look somewhat like Scrum at the practice level but at the cultural level it will be Kanban - softly softly evolution rather than shock treatment and revolution. When considering whether Scrum or Kanban is right for you and your business consider the culture and maturity. If your organization has low maturity, limited capability at risk management, change management and decision making, and is riddled with specialization and defensiveness then Kanban is probably a better choice. If you have time to let the culture and performance evolve and improve over months and years then Kanban is the right choice. If on the other hand, your organization is highly mature and capable of assessing risk, evaluating process alternatives, making good quality decisions, and managing high impact change gracefully then Scrum may be the right choice for you. If you are facing an extinction level event and you don’t have time to let evolution work its magic on your organizational performance then perhaps a Scrum revolution is worth the risk. Kaizen, Kanban, Lean, LimitedWIPSociety, Scrum, Scrumban 2010-06-11T05:23:16+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/chicago_may/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/chicago_may/#When:21:35:40Z My third US based open Kanban Coaching Workshop will take place in downtown Chicago, May 17-19, 2010. This event is limited to 8 participants in order to best facilitate learning and knowledge transfer. These intensive 3 day workshops are intended to transfer the knowledge and skills to existing Agile, process and project management coaches consultants, to lead Lean transformations using kanban systems. The 2010 inclusive price for this workshop is $3000! Don’t miss out! Read what others are saying about this workshop. - Rachel Davies, Kanban Coaching Insights - Karen Graves, Kanban Evolution - Armond Mehrabian, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Register today. Great value at $3000 USD per person…                                           This workshop is for experienced Agile or project management coaches, existing Kanban practitioners with 1 year of experience, and those who have previously taken David J. Anderson’s Kanban class and are actively using Kanban at work. This workshop is intended to be an interactive collaborative session designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. 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 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. For more details download the PDF flyer Location: The Wit Hotel, Downtown Chicago How to get there: Directions via the hotel web site. For those visiting from out of town, fly to either Chicago O’Hare (ORD) or Chicago Midway (MDW) and follow the hotel directions to the venue.   Events 2010-05-14T21:35:40+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/london_June/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/london_June/#When:21:27:35Z My second ever UK based open Kanban Coaching Workshop will take place in London, June 24-26, 2010. This event is limited to 12 participants in order to best facilitate learning and knowledge transfer. These intensive 3 day workshops are intended to transfer the knowledge and skills to existing Agile, process and project management coaches and consultants. The focus is on advanced kanban systems design, systems thinking and leading a change management initiative. In the latest iteration of this workshop we work through the 2-day class teaching material and design a kanban system and change management program for a real situation. We discuss in detail the challenges and issues. Some attendees will be capable of delivering a 2-day class for their clients as an outcome. Others will be able to lead a change initiative and kanban system design within a client organization. Don’t miss out! Read what others are saying about this workshop. - Rachel Davies, Kanban Coaching Insights - Karen Graves, Kanban Evolution - Armond Mehrabian, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Register today. Great value at $3000 USD per person…                                     This workshop is for experienced Agile or project management coaches, existing Kanban practitioners with 1 year of experience, and those who have previously taken David J. Anderson’s Kanban class and are actively using Kanban at work. This workshop is intended to be an interactive collaborative session designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning. 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 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. For more details download the PDF flyer Location: Being negotiated. [Will be in central London] How to get there: Details to be announced. Events 2010-05-14T21:27:35+00:00 http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/Blog/thoughts_on_lssc10/ http://agilemanagement.net/index.php/site/thoughts_on_lssc10/#When:06:34:08Z On Friday night I flew out of Atlanta for London and Hamburg, after a successful Lean Software & Systems Conference at the JW Marriott. It had been almost a year in planning. I thought it would be appropriate to take a moment to reflect on a project successfully delivered. Planning for #lssc10 started on the final day of the Lean & Kanban Conference in Miami in May 2009. Software Engineering Professionals (SEP) impressed with what they saw in Miami and keen to help grow the community, offered me their Director of Marketing, Kelly Wilson as the event planner for 2010, in exchange for title/organizer sponsorship. Kelly is a professional experienced event planner. I jumped at the offer. This mitigated the first major risk for 2010. In total Kelly must have devoted about 14 weeks of effort to #lssc10. SEP were by far the largest contributor to the success of the event. The next job was to a pick a venue. We picked the city of Atlanta because it was still in the Eastern time zone and closer to Europe and South America and had a major hub airport. We also hoped that the Atlanta Agile and PMI communities would be excited by our event and turn out in force. We planned for 300 people - a massive step up on 57 in Miami. We hoped for 80 from Atlanta. In the end, it wasn’t to be. We got less than 10 from Atlanta. However, the choice of Atlanta was still good for travelers and worked well for international guests. Within Atlanta we solicited bids via the Vistor’s Bureau from suitable venues. We narrowed this down to 3 candidates, one in downtown, one in midtown and the other in Buckhead. We ended up picking the JW Marriott in Buckhead. I believe that the two main risks in any conference are the event planner and the venue and the past week has shown that we successfully mitigated both. The JW Marriott really worked out. People liked the location. They liked the proximity to public transport and straight train ride to the airport. They liked the intimacy of the venue and close proximity of all the rooms which made for easy transition between sessions and lots of coverage for the exhibit booths. The next big executive decision was the program. I pushed back on some Lean SSC principles and ran with a 3 track, 2 key note format, with an open space on day 3, plus a title sponsor talk, over the same 2.5 days as 2009. This gave us 43 sessions up from 19 in 2009. That’s a lot more complexity and cost to carry. However, it also worked out. One of the more interesting comments since the event has been “the lack of Kanban content.” It’s interesting that this was the perception from some of the more advanced, expert members of our community. Lean Software & Systems 2010 actually had more Kanban content than any other event held anywhere, previous to this. In fact there were 10 Kanban track sessions, plus 10 experience reports, nearly all Kanban related, plus a the title sponsor talk that included a case study from a major investment firm, again about Kanban, plus Kanban games in the Open space, and Kanban related lightning talks. It’s actually a tribute to the quantity, quality and diversity of the other content that some Kanban experts chose to spend their time in other sessions and hence perceived a lack of Kanban content at the conference. The conference also met all my major goals: set the direction for the community; show the growth and vibrancy of the community; demonstrate beyond all reasonable doubt that Lean and Kanban are a force for good and genuine trend in software engineering and IT related work. The key note speeches were probably the 3rd major risk. Some questioned the choice of Bob Charette as they weren’t familiar with him or his work. However, both Don Reinertsen and Robert Charette were incredibly well received and their talks defined the direction I want the community to follow - a new definition of Lean that includes economics, risk management and systems thinking. Together Bob and Don laid out both a strategic direction for us to follow and specific areas of interest for us to pursue at a practical, pragmatic, actionable level. One of the highlights for me was standing in the exhibit area just absorbing the atmosphere and thinking that this time last year, none of this existed. We had 4 vendors showing Kanban tools on their booths and two others represented amongst the speakers. We had a definable sub-community of tool vendors and creators. I was also delighted to present the first ever Brickell Key Awards, commemorating the formation of our community and organization in Miami in 2009. The award went to two very worthy winners, Alisson Vale and David Joyce. I’ve blogged over at Limited WIP Society about these. I’m out of time today. I’ll blog more thoughts about the event soon. I’m off to teach Kanban in Hamburg now. Kanban, Leadership, Lean, LimitedWIPSociety 2010-04-26T06:34:08+00:00