You know how when you go to conferences and the best parts are the impromptu conversations in the halls? This is where real knowledge creation happens. Practitioners, experts, theorists and the uninitiated get together to discuss the real issues that are plaguing software development. At LSSC12, we've dedicated a full day to bringing everyone together to create new ideas and flesh out old ones. Come to Lean Camp on Sunday and join over 100 other thinkers and doers.
Lean Camp is a time for serious, dedicated Open Space. It's about learning, creating, and building value by discussing Lean Principles, Deming, real-world stories, and the impacts of collaboration and respect in the workplace. Kanban, Personal Kanban, Agile, Six Sigma, 5s, is all on the table...but so is the root of all these forms...Continuous Improvement.
Join practitioners, thinkers, and luminaries from the kanban community to create, discuss and really go deep on the issues important to us.
Early registration will be available for attendees arriving early. Registration will be open from 3:00-5:00 p.m.
It may sound a bit over the top, but the Action Kitchen is a demonstration and teaching kitchen attached to the hotel for LSSC12.
Jim Benson will demonstrate lean concepts and teach some cooking basics in the ACTION KITCHEN. Want to know about cooking kanban? About the difference between standard work and innovation? About continuous improvement? About how to cook well in the Internet age? Sign up for Jim's entertaining take on lean cuisine. Event Tickets are available for purchase. Space is limited.
Network and mingle with the attendees and speakers of the conference! The LSSC12 Welcome Reception is open to all attendees. Event is included with cost of registration. Additional tickets for guests are available for purchase during registration.
A select few organizations dominate their competition on every conceivable measure: time to market, quality, system reliability, security, and so forth. They do so by creating and sustaining a pace and breadth of internally generated improvement and innovation, that rivals cannot keep up. Examples span design and operation: including Pratt and Whitney--which compressed from 4 years to 3 jet-engine design cycle time while halving engineering change orders, a micro-chip fab which cut by half its throughput time while increasing capacity, improving quality and yield--leading to a per unit cost cut of 35%, and the US Navy's nuclear propulsion program which has operated since 1954 without any reactor related injury or environmental contamination. By the end of the session, attendees will have a view to how market beating performance can be achieved by:
-- designing processes and systems so problems can be seen when and where they occur.
-- solving problems at the time and place detected to build new useful knowledge
-- sharing new found knowledge for systemic incorporation
-- leading an organization capable of relentless learning and adaptation.
Steven Spear, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Engineering Systems Division, is an internationally recognized expert about leadership, innovation, and operational excellence, with particular emphasis on how select companies convert improvement and innovation from the rare kiss of inspiration to repeatable, broad-based, skill-based disciplines. He is an award winning author of The High Velocity Edge and articles that have appeared in Harvard Business Review, the NYTimes, the Boston Globe, Annals of Internal Medicine, and elsewhere. He has worked with companies as diverse as Alcoa, Intel, Intuit, Lockheed Martin, is on the board of a medical IT company, Aceso, and is founder of another IT company, See-to-Solve.
Even though traditional models and assumptions represent thinking that originated in the 1890s with Taylor (fixation on efficiency and utilisation) and Gantt (of Gantt chart fame) they seem remarkably impervious to change.
Our problem is that we need to change otherwise we can never achieve true business agility.
In this talk I will contrast the differences between a traditional PMO and a Lean/Agile PMO, outline the value a Lean/Agile PMO can bring, and explain how Kanban can be used as a vehicle to move portfolio management into the 21st Century!
What do we actually know about the problems we are trying to tackle and how we should be tackling them? Is there a process where by we can efficiently discover value and thereby build solutions with confidence? We'll explore these ideas and why the Lean Startup framework as emerged. I welcome skeptics and challengers for a lively discussion!
While the design of kanban systems and visualizations is becoming well understood in the community and the concept that the Kanban Method is a way of catalyzing evolutionary change to existing process, there is still little understanding of how get started with a Kanban initiative. This talk will present the systematic approach employed by David J. Anderson to enable organizations to bootstrap a Kanban initiative. David will explain the approach to understanding the current circumstances, soliciting sources of dissatisfaction from all stakeholders via interviews and anecdotal evidence. He will then show how to develop an understanding of demand and capability breaking demand down by work type and required class of service. Workflow can then be studied for each work type by identifying a sequence of dominant activities for knowledge discovery. All of this input is used to develop a kanban system design. The new system is then socialized with stakeholders and its design points negotiated. Finally a rollout plan is produced and a kick-off meeting is held.
This talk is suitable for anyone tasked with implementing Kanban to improve predictability, better manage risk or catalyze the emergence of a kaizen culture. Attendees will leave with the the confidence that getting started with Kanban can be achieved with a methodical, repeatable process.
Learning is the new currency. Practices and processes will come and go; only the
wise survive. If you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, Kanban nor
Lean, nor any other cool new thing will deliver the maximum benefit. And if you’re
not learning, you’ll never know what you’re missing.
When I talk to teams struggling with Kanban and Lean implementations, I find many
similarities. Some typical responses I hear:
Hear any common themes? These teams don’t have a clear outcome or purpose for
adopting Kanban. It looked cool, something previous wasn’t working, or someone
told them to do it – all extremely effective ways to NOT get the maximum value out
of Kanban.
In each of these cases, when I refocused the team on learning, perspectives changed.
Asking the following question changed their focus.
How are you using Kanban to learn about: The product you’re building? The project?
The technology? The domain? The users? The market? The delivery? Your team?
And Improvement?
During this talk we will explore (or re-explore) why you are using the tools and
processes you are using. Did you make a wise choice or just pick the latest flavor
of the month? Brace yourself for a high-impact, interactive, and introspective
rediscovering of your first love: No, not Kanban… your brain.
We are in the midst of a massive transformation of human work into partnerships with machine systems. At the leading edge are people who build those systems and who are reinventing the way they produce value using the concepts embodied in Kanban and Lean. Multiplayer video games represent our most highly evolved forms of human-computer team interaction. Games offer a detailed blueprint for how work can be reconfigured to be more engaging, productive and even deeply satisfying. The ingredients used by great game designers are knowable and can be assembled to complement and greatly enhance the transformation envisioned in Lean software and systems approaches. These benefits require that game ideas be deployed in ways that individual workers (players) see as legitimately satisfying their interests and those of the enterprise’s epic story.
Lean works in today's companies ... sometimes. Agile works ... sometimes. Traditional methods used to work, but don't anymore. Over the last 47 years, across tens of thousands of companies and despite massive expansions in both management and technical theory, corporate Return on Assets (ROA) today is only 25% of what it was in 1965. Let that number sink in a minute.
How can companies be doing so poorly when they are more bottom-line focused than ever? It is because most people, at a deep level, still think of the world in much the same way people did a hundred years ago. Even many Lean and Agile people. Today we know much more about how the universe works than we did then. This session will explore how we can leverage the best current understanding of reality into a Lean Systems Framework that improves technical execution and business performance.
The Lean Systems Framework is built upon the foundations of Lean product development, cognitive science, physics, philosophy, complexity theory, and systems thinking. Kanban, Lean Startup and other proven systems streams fit naturally into this framework, and we shall discuss how and where they fit. The framework reinforces and integrates these approaches so they can work together even better than they do alone. The best companies today are already implementing elements of this framework. They have largely escaped the great economic slide of the last 47 years and are currently experiencing 1965-level returns. The framework as a whole gives even greater opportunities, creating synergy and adding performance leverage.
Come and find keys for moving your company and your technical work beyond historic norms to new levels of success.
There is a deep cultural belief in Australian business that 'there just has to be a better way'.
In 2009 the small team of legal affairs professionals at Lonely Planet headquarters in Melbourne had witnessed first-hand the transition of an IT and digital product organisation to agile and kanban methods, and they suspected many of the principles could work for them too.
Focusing on customer value, flow of work, and waste elimination as their key tenets, they transformed their team from an order-taking shared service model (with an invisible workload) to running a sustainable pull system with a sophisticated wip-limited kanban board, where work is not 'done' until the first value flows from a contract.
This case study shows how a profession built on adherence to long-standing command and control culture can through application of lean, agile and kanban principles become an influential innovator among their knowledge worker peers in a global organisation.
If there is one certainty about large-scale organizational transformation it is to expect uncertainty. Kanban provides an alternate approach to traditional, big-bang change. But even a Kanban change initiative is guaranteed to provide a highly unpredictable outcome.
Eric Ries definition of a startup is as follows:
"A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."
By this definition, an enterprise Kanban change initiative could be deemed a startup, one that could take advantage of Lean Startup techniques.
During this session I will present a case study on how a team of Kanban change agents leveraged the Lean Startup approach to enable validated learning on a large scale organizational transformation.
I'll discuss how we tested the assumptions behind our transformation through the successful rollout of Minimum Viable Changes (MVCs). I will showcase how we cycled through the learn, build, and measure loop to steer the course of our transformation. Finally, I'll give an overview of our key pivot/pursue decisions, and describe how the lean startup approach provided us with the feedback required to make several significant changes in direction during the course of the transformation.
"Kanban rocks" is the motto of more and more people in the IT industry. That is for good reasons: Kanban follows simple rules, is based on easy accessible mechanics, easy to implement, and leads to significant improvements within a short period of time. However, a lot of Kanban initiatives vanish as quickly as they were introduced. That is also for good reasons: People are trying to break emotions with a crowbar instead of using them as drivers of change. Introducing Kanban means doing a change initiative - it is about people and not pure mechanics, it is targeting the working culture, and it is team sport in terms of shared leadership and accountability. In my presentation I will point out a way that addresses these essential aspects of a Kanban change initiative so that an emerging culture of continuous improvement has a chance to survive.
Traditional management has failed. To deal with a radically different marketplace and workplace, today the whole organization must be focused on creating a stream of additional value to customers through continuous innovation and delivering it sooner. In short, delight the customer. This reinvention of management reflects in part an application of Agile/Scrum thinking to the whole organization.
Drawing on his award-winning book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010), Steve Denning shows how the reinvention of management involves five fundamental shifts in terms of the firm’s goal, the role of managers, the way work is coordinated, the shift from value to values and the shift in communications shift from command to conversation.
As technology marches forward, system complexity continues to rise. Many of the most critical design decisions are made very early in projects, before the system designers can possibly know all that they need to know to make those decisions correctly. That inevitably results in what we call "loopbacks", where earlier decisions (that were thought to be final) must be re-made, resulting in a cascade of changes to portions of the design that were dependent on those earlier decisions. Avoiding that waste is a key driver of the Lean principle of delayed decision-making. However, putting that into action is not as simple as delaying decisions... it is often very hard to make progress on your design if you are waiting on various decisions to be made. This is where Set-Based Design comes to the rescue. Set-Based Design is often mis-represented as simply performing multiple Point-Based Designs in parallel so that you are more likely to have one good design. Rather, Set-Based Design will be described as a radical departure from traditional Point-Based Design, moving from the inefficient pattern of guess-then-test-to-validate to a highly efficient pattern of test-to-learn-then-design.
Early adopters of Kanban in the IT services realm are designing systems which consider high levels of interrupt driven work and big differences in task size. This work doesn't typically drive revenue and thus creates unique challenges. Add to that, the conundrum of handling dependencies, distributed teams, and shared resources, a kanban design for IT Ops may look very different than a Kanban design for development. This talk covers real world examples from IT teams working to optimize the whole of their organization.
In my efforts of bringing Continuous Improvement to the sales and marketing arena, I have found the ability to share and create knowledge with your customer has become the strongest marketing tool possible. The Business901 Podcast has allowed me to be at the leading edge of some of the latest thinking. Find out in my presentation how Service Design, Design Thinking, Appreciative Inquiry, Lean Standard Work and the Customer Value Plugin for the Business Model Canvas are being applied to Lean.
Leading edge practices: possibilities opened by a new operating system for
managing work in projects;
People who manage projects spend their days and nights coping with uncertainty,
trying to figure out what is to be done and how. It gets harder when projects
are Complex, Uncertain and Quick and even harder with traditional project
management. Surprising data opened the path to a new and now well-established
operating system for managing work in projects. The development of that operating
system will be traced and the power of leading edge practices; Target Value Design
supported by A3 thinking, and Choosing By Advantages on CUQ projects described
and explored.
Visualising work is a key part of the Kanban Method. In many situations it can lead to people realising there are problems or opportunities for improvement, which can be successfully accomplished by simply changing behaviour (single loop learning). However, in some situations, these change may require challenging existing mindsets (referred to as double loop learning). Using practical examples drawn from directly helping teams, this talk will present a model for understanding how we can proactively engage in conversations that increase the chances of capitalising on the value that visualising the work provides.
Ever feel your organization is trying to run up a down escalator which is ever speeding up? Well, it’s probably because it is. Relentless changes in technology, competition and market conditions – just to name three driving forces – are making it ever more difficult to make good decisions concerning what risks to manage and what opportunities to pursue next. Just as you think you have something under control, something comes along and turns everything upside down.
In this talk, Robert Charette will describe his three dimensional risk escalator or helix to help understand the myriad of dynamic forces acting on (and inside) organizations today, and how instead of merely reacting to them, an organization embracing lean software and systems development can manipulate these forces to their advantage and profit.
This talk discusses how to achieve multiple team collaboration in large scale software development. Self-organization is a key concept for all Lean-Agile methods. However, as projects expand across the enterprise and, more specifically, cut across multiple teams, teams clearly can’t just organize in any way they want to. A blend of top-down direction with bottom-up self organization is needed. Lean provides the insights necessary for teams to self-organize within the context of the value stream within which the teams work. A top-down perspective, created by driving from business value, can provide insights on how teams must organize and work together.
This talk presents some case studies where the principles of Lean-Flow provide the guidance for multiple teams to self-organize as a bigger team. This guidance includes how providing work to the teams can effectively lower the coordination necessary. This determination of work to be done typically must be decided not by the teams themselves but by proxies for the business stakeholders.
Essentially, quick delivery at scale often requires decisions about what the teams are to work on before the work hits the teams themselves. These decisions provide the context within which the teams then self-organize to implement the value to be delivered.
I first learned about a Kanban approach to development from an apologetic agile practitioner concerned that they’d broken “the rules.” Although it’s common practice, fixed time-boxes aren’t a required strategy for agile development. Since Kanban’s broad adoption, I’ve continued to encounter a number of myths and misconceptions both for and against Kanban. In this short talk I’ll review my top 10 myths and misconceptions, along with a few neglected and important principles of Lean thinking that many in software development, including Kanban practitioners, neglect.
Modeling and Monte-carlo simulation allows rapid (and repetitive) "what-if" risk analysis to be performed on proposed or ongoing Lean/Kanban projects. This analysis leads to reliably forecasting delivery dates, cost, staffing-requirements, and informed risk management. Learn how to quickly find options that minimize cost and delivery time, whilst maximizing revenue for a project and portfolio.
Modeling and simulation gives you a platform for experimentation before and during a project. Modeling your development process and project allows you to simulate possible delivery date/cost outcomes 1000's of times, and then compare these results to quickly find those model inputs that have the greatest impact on a final result (cost, date, or cycle-time); and then manage your project accordingly.
This talk both introduces the concepts and then discusses through detailed examples, how to answer important questions like:
1. What is the impact of outsourcing my QA process? Is it cost effective?
2. What is the cost impact because of high defect rates during development?
3. What is the delivery date impact of losing a key staff member? What staff skills do I need to hire next?
By the end of this session you will understand the capabilities of Monte-carlo simulation and modeling a Kanban project and be in a position to embrace these techniques in your own projects and teams.
It's 5 years since David Anderson and Rick Garber first presented the Kanban Method to a limited audience at small conference in Chicago.
Today Kanban has a thriving global community, has spread to use as a personal productivity tool, as Personal Kanban, and has grown up and evolved for use managing programs and project portfolios. An entire market has emerged filled with vendors offering software to track work, projects, personal tasks and programs. Online games, simulations and board games have appeared. Lean & Kanban conferences take place around the world and informal meetup groups such as Lean Coffee and Limited WIP Society have sprung up around the world. This session will give the community an opportunity for reflection on how far we've come in 5 years and some insights into what's next for Kanban.
Servant leadership was coined by Robert Greenleaf, a management thinker at AT&T, almost half a century ago. He was influenced by Nobel Laureate Herman Hesse's book 'The Journey to the East.' Herman Hesse, in turn, was influenced by Eastern philosophy and its view of leadership. In this presentation, Pujan Roka provides lesser known facts and history of servant leadership. He also explains why servant leadership is becoming important in a world that is becoming increasingly connected, informed, and democratized. Those who deal with knowledge workers will learn key concepts to promote and practice servant leadership in their organizations.
There is a war going on, tragically consumed behind corporate walls. It’s a war of worlds, a war of cultures, where the few who command & control systematically crush people’s hearts and minds. Frontal attack is futile. We like to call ourselves change agents, right shifters, sensei, coaches. We prescribe our medicines and leave. But what change does really happen? How long does it last? Imagine, however, what it would be like if someone offered you a practical way to dig into deeper forms of thinking, turn fire fighters into problem solvers, share and celebrate every victory – however small, and make improvements an everyday part of an entire organization. What would you do? How far would you go? In this award-winning session, Claudio will unleash the power of story to throw you into a world where specific Lean problem solving techniques, Kanban and quick Kaizen systems are leading managers and teams of a large organization to a path of continuous improvement.
Resources required to execute Lean programs and projects compete with the myriad of other requests for resources executives weigh and decide upon on a regular basis. Though the scope of the "Lean Lense" has traditionally been on improvement, Lean programs and projects can contribute to enterprise value by resolving existing problems, mitigating risks, and capturing improvement opportunities. This presentation details how this broader scoping of Lean initiatives coupled with an enterprise metric of value creation and protection enables Lean programs and projects to appropriately compete with all other requests for the enterprise's limited resources--staff time and dollars.
Are Classes of Service always applicable in Kanban system design? Why or why not would a team choose to use a Class of Service scheme? Is it possible to know whether the introduction of Classes of Service has been a benefit or detriment to a system’s performance? This interactive session will be an in-depth discussion around the pros and cons of a Class of Service approach in Kanban.
When the Wright brothers flew their first plane, one of their key inventions was the ability to change the shape of the wings in flight, so as to steer the plane and keep it aloft. At first all of the control was done by the pilot, but feedback control systems were soon developed to automatically simulate a good pilot’s actions. When the first cars rolled off of Henry Ford’s automotive assembly line, they were made with thick, uneven sheet metal made with manually controlled processes. But feedback control systems were rapidly developed that allowed the manufacture of much thinner and more precise sheet metal, leading to lighter, sleeker cars.
As systems increase in complexity, feedback control systems have always been developed to manage that complexity. In our world of developing complex software-intensive systems, we have recently arrived at the stage of Wright brothers were during their early flights – we can now design our systems so that we can modify them in flight, observe the results, then manually make corrections.
This talk is about using feedback control to radically improve the process of developing of software-intensive systems. It covers:
What does Kanban have to say about risk? Some of the answers may surprise you.
Even early on in its implementation, Kanban can help you to recognize certain types of risk quickly and to manage them visually. As the dynamics of your processes are revealed in action, Kanban may prompt changes to the way your work is structured, scheduled and monitored, with clear benefits in process performance. Less obviously, Kanban may challenge deeply-held assumptions about when, where and by whom risk should be managed, perhaps with wide implications for your organization. Most surprisingly of all, Kanban may encourage you to embrace certain types of risk, both to improve your process capability and to help achieve better results from the systems you build and maintain.
Many teams, individuals and organisations are delivering projects - or at least they think they do! In reality most of them are developing products, i.e. web services or inhouse applications. The whole concept of project development was useful some years ago - as our industries were unable to lower transaction costs and release frequently. Nowadays not only do we have the technical possibilities for continuous delivery; In addition Kanban provides us with the right framework to spot and manage buffers and to make good decisions regarding the correct batch size.
This talk will show the differences between thinking in projects vs. thinking in products and the benefits that arise from switching to the latter.
A decade ago, Wikipedia burst into a world not ready to comprehend it. Thousands of people cooperating effectively, without price signals to offer “incentives” or managerial hierarchy to direct efforts was simply impossible. And yet, it moves. And as it moved it combined with a deep shift across many disciplines, from biology and neuroscience to organizational sociology, experimental economics, and social psychology to paint a very different view of who we are as human beings. Slowly pushing back against decades of ever-refined analyses based on self-interested rationality, we begin to see that we are diverse beings; that a majority of us responds cooperatively to cooperative settings—we tend to treat well those who have treated us well, rather than take advantage of them; we tend to do what we think is right and fair, when it is clear in the setting what that is; we experience empathy, and it makes us more generous and trustworthy; we experience solidarity with others, and that makes us contributed more willingly to the group's goals. Moreover, explicit payments, the touchstone of mechanism design under universal self-interested rationality, turns out to have a much more complex relationship with motivation than simple addition. All this work in basic behavioral sciences combines with observations from organizational sociology, political science, management studies, and social software design to provide a basis on which to build a field of cooperative human systems design.
This session is a hands-on Kanban System Design simulation. Teams will design their own Kanban systems, taking into account work item types, skills available, capacity, etc, execute them for a period of time, then compare and discuss the outcomes.
The scenario is an Operations team which has three types of incoming work: Incidents, Change Requests, and Project Tasks. Points are won or lost based on timely completion of work items. Different specialized skills are required, such as networking, database administration, desktop support, etc.
Game instructions are provided in the attached PDF. Given the short session duration, please read the instructions prior to the session to reduce our startup time.
Click here for game instructions.
There is good evidence from experience reports and other literature that an on-demand or kanban approach to scheduling is highly effective in many instances of software development activities. The question remains, however, if it is equally applicable to the systems and enterprise engineering found in large or complex system environments. This paper discusses goals, concepts and initial findings from ongoing research into this question within a specific type of environment. The research focuses on rapid response software development projects incrementally evolving capabilities of existing systems of systems. It is defining and modeling the combination of a kanban-based, value-driven scheduling system with a negotiation-based services approach to systems engineering in such an environment.
The situations we must manage span the range from deterministic to stochastic. On the deterministic end we have wonderful methods from the highly repetitive world of manufacturing. On the extreme stochastic end, completely unpredictable situations with an infinite number of possible conditions, each of unknown likelihood, planning is useless. Product development lies between these extremes – we deal with limited rather than complete uncertainty. Such conditions also appear in other domains. In this session Don Reinertsen will discuss the strategies of decentralized control that are used in the military. Such approaches are interesting because they work at large scale and they have avoided the natural tendency of self-organization to turn into local optimization.
Patterns describe a problem for a given context and offer a solution based on experience that has been consistently successful. A pattern language of flow, if it existed, would attempt to identify problems with the flow of work in software development from request to release. The existence of problems could be confirmed with the use of empirical data and visualisations. Solutions could also use empirical data to inform better economic decisions and create the catalyst for change.
This talk will outline successful flow based strategies used in the software industry to build the right thing, improve quality, increase throughput or reduce the time it takes from the request of a feature until its delivery. The strategies are based on the experience of the author along side development communities in New Zealand and the UK, making them candidates to form the basis of a Pattern Language of Flow in collaboration with the wider community.
Note: Twitter will be used to interact with attendees throughout the session @gareth__evans (double underscore)
Discussions of systems engineering theory and practice usually focus on the technical tasks that are to be performed by systems engineers. In this presentation, a set of socially-oriented tasks that are necessary to accomplish the systems engineering mission on a large-scale system development are described, and the need for the inclusion within the scope of the systems engineering function established. Most importantly, the implications for technical practices are described; for example, the representations and views of a system used by the systems engineering function are asserted to have a critical role in the success of these social-oriented systems engineering tasks, and through them, on the success of the entire project. The over-all impact on the systems engineering process of incorporating social aspects into the process and responsibilities are considered, and it is shown that the net effect is to increase the efficiency of the over-all process. Because these techniques help to manage and counter the complexity inherent in such large-scale system developments, they therefore constitute an appropriate element of lean engineering.
Lean initiatives start out strong, with healthy principles and exciting rhetoric. But we still run into issues along the way - people become bottlenecks, teams wage war against other teams, deadline pressures make us break our WIP, blame still rears its ugly head. Why do these still happen to allegedly enlightened lean teams? What happens when our lean team fights with other non-lean teams? Why do we instinctively keep promising deliverables by certain dates - even when we know we can't reliably do so? Jim Benson discusses the fetid underpinnings of the human psyche and how knowledge workers are extremely susceptible to them.
Are you tired of the myth that Scrum, XP and Kanban do not scale to the needs of the larger software enterprise? Are you tired of the ideologies that prevent your enterprise from even trying to apply them? If the answer to either of the above is yes, this presentation is for you.
In this presentation, Dean Leffingwell will finally dispel these myths and ideologies by describing the Scaled Agile Framework(TM), a public-facing set of practices which have been used to successfully scale Lean|Agile development to hundreds--and even thousands--of practitioners at companies like BMC Corporation, John Deere and others.
He'll describe five key scaling mechanisms:
However, since simply making Agile things bigger does not necessarily keep a system lean, Leffingwell will describe how the framework a) keeps work in process visible and limited, b) keeps backlogs and queues short, c) uses cadence and synchronization to manage variability and align teams to a common mission, and d) applies system-level continuous integration to facilitate fast customer feedback.
Time and money are precious to any business. If you could “see ahead” of everyone else and cut your need for both resources, would you gain a business advantage?
That’s what the General Theory of Innovation (GTI) has been delivering to product developers for the last several years. Its originator, Greg Yezersky, universalized a true Systems-level approach to finding and capitalizing on where a market is going, based on fifty years of design improvement findings from the TRIZ methodology. GTI identifies which products a business needs to direct its energies into, to take full advantage of the evolution logic followed by all markets.
GTI also provides something critical that has been missing in the Lean Startups approach. Lean Startups-style experimentation is an ideal way to get around the low effectiveness of traditional market exploration approaches like focus groups, marketing clinics, and customer surveys. These only have the likelihood of creating market growth below 1 percent. Lean Startups is much better, but still inefficient because it subjectively “stabs in the dark” to choose its experiments: It lacks a systematic front-end approach to determine where to conduct your experiments. In other words, it gives no help on finding out what your customers need next…and most. GTI provides the “eyes” you need to use Lean Startups effectively. The GTI approach is equally effective in a traditional established business environment, where forecasting lowers risks and improves results. In either case, it will lower your burn of time and money.
This session will present the GTI-based framework for how to see what none of your competitors can see, and tools for zeroing-in on what you need to do next for best business effect. It's like adding radar to your binoculars! The session will provide real-life examples, with actual results, and take-home tools you can use right away. If you also choose to attend the two-day workshop following the conference session, you will learn the step-by-step methodology (called the Design for Advantage™) and all the details (process, tools, principles, etc.) hands-on, with extended examples, background theory, and more helpful tools.
Lean/Agile is not just about delivering early and often, it is even more importantly about continuously adapting the way we work towards an improved capability of delivery. Yet how many of us have worked in a continuously improving organization? How many of us have seen one in real life?
It’s hard to keep management interested in Improvement for very long, making Continuous Improvement a holy grail of sorts. As Lean/Kanban practitioners we believe the only sustainable way to improve is via evolutionary emerging change. But if we the organization is not interested in pursuing it, we have a big problem.
Through some challenging situations from real client work we will see a few patterns that fail and a few patterns that show more promise for energizing improvement. We will also look at improvement pace and how to apply kanban approaches to make the improvement more sustainable.
We will also explore some local cultural aspects that might affect the drive (or lack of) towards improvement, and how to deal with them, with some interesting insights about the Israeli culture…
All five steps of lean thinking (Value, Value Stream, Pull, Flow, and Perfection) focus on customer (stakeholder) value. The fundamental purpose of systems (products, and services) in to provide value for stakeholders. Systems engineers are leaders of systems thinking, systems integration, and systems decision-making. Therefore, systems engineers play a critical role of working with stakeholders to identify and measure stakeholder value during the system life cycle to support systems decision making. Lean and system engineering have very common goals. However, in order to achieve these goals, they need to be able to qualitatively and quantitative define stakeholder value. For complex, dynamic, and interdependent systems there are many system functions that create value for multiple stakeholders. System designs must consider conflicting values and objectives of these multiple stakeholders. This presentation illustrates the use of functional analysis and Value-Focused Thinking with multiple objective decision analysis to develop a mathematically sound value model that clearly identifies stakeholder value across the life cycle value stream and measures the potential value of system designs and improvements that can effectively and efficiently increase potential value. The presentation illustrates and advocates the early development of the value model and the use to the value model to assess value trade-offs during the entire system life cycle.
Don't let the bureaucracy of everyday compliance issues get in your way of being lean and achieving excellence.
Hear about a revealing systematic approach that puts compliance properly in its place -- behind your pursuit of excellence.
Discover the secrets of incorporating non-value-added necessities into the value-added work stream.
One characteristic of the approach distinct from many lean initiatives is that it does not rely solely on incremental kaizen and "low-hanging fruit".
High Performance Operations looks at several facets including common mistakes that hinder high performance, the role of leadership, culture, trust, empowerment, learning and communication -- as prerequisites.
See how lean and kanban can be used to easily, seamlessly, effectively, and transparently incorporate compliance requirements into the flow of an operation. This also provides the insight and metrics for an operation to pull itself towards predictable, high-confidence performance -- the realm of high maturity -- while remaining agile and responsive.
As Lean and Agile transitions from small teams to large organizations, and from progressive organizations to more pragmatic organizations that demand evidence for decision making, a new set of challenges emerge. While many have rightfully encouraged the use of qualitative insight by those closer to the work we can no longer avoid embracing metrics to demonstrate the value of adopting certain practices. Kanban is about visualizing the work but it's also about providing quantitative feedback in the form of lead-time and other metrics.
This talk introduces a disruptive new form of quantitative feedback, the Time In State InSITe visualization for visualizing any time in state data, and walks through in detail the use of a particular instantiation, the Time in Process (TIP) Chart for visualizing lead-time data. It is intended to be used in situations where misapplications of control limits often occur. The talk also provides guidance about the problems with control limit calculations used in this domain to motivate the reduction in misapplication.
Lastly, it introduces the ODIM framework intended to guide metrics choices and avoid misapplications like that which has happened with the use of control limit calculations. The ODIM framework is built upon the thought that better [M]easurement/Visualization leads to better [I]nsight leads to better [D]ecisions leads to better [O]utcomes. It's ODIM rather than MIDO because, like reading a kanban board, it's best to start from the right (Outcomes) and work your way left when making measurement choices.
Working closely with end users can help ensure complex systems meet not just the contractual specification but also operators’ and other stakeholders’ evolving needs in realistic operational environments. Gaining users’ strong support is crucial to maintaining funding for projects and programs in austere budget environment. But working with users is often difficult to arrange and fraught with challenges: They often disagree among themselves and change their opinions frequently. And which users should we contact and whose inputs should we consider? Users don’t speak engineering and engineers seldom speak “ops” so how can we have a meaningful conversation with them anyway? DOD contracts seldom contain any provisions for contacting or visiting with end users, nor does the USG want to pay for such discussions, so how can we arrange discussions with end users? Since there is no substitute for detailed operational discussions with end users of complex systems, an effective, efficient, reliable method must be found by systems engineers and project managers for the regular, methodical engagement of hands-on users of the systems we design and build. This presentation describes the Technical Concept of Operations (TechCONOPS) as the primary document for tying together users, buyers and designers. Then the briefer discusses the four most common user groups, when to involve each and what kinds of information we can typically get from them. This is followed by a brief discussion of how a robust TechCONOPS can drive modeling and simulation. Lastly the other two key communities (technologists and threat/intel specialists) are discussed in the context of their crucial contributions during regular revisits/updates to the CONOPS. Finally, several real-world examples of failed developmental systems (division air defense artillery system, UAV, imagery analysis software, others) illustrate common pitfalls of not building CONOPS and not involving hands-on end users early enough or often enough in system design and test.
The greatest benefits from adopting the Kanban Method rely on leaders helping teams and organisations adopt not just a new set of behaviours but also a different set of values and beliefs about people and how they work (double loop learning). Producing these double-loop changes requires that Leaders are able to reason and communicate productively, even in the face of personal and organizational defensive routines.
This practically-focused tutorial will provide participants with an opportunity to reflect on their own communication skills in key real-world scenarios encountered when using the Kanban Method in teams and organisations. The tutorial is based on the Mutual Learning Model, developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schon. It will cover tools such as the Ladder of Inference, the Left Hand Right Hand Case Study approach as well as effective behaviours like balancing advocacy and inquiry.
The results from using the Mutual Learning Model are faster and better quality decisions, higher level of commitment from groups and individuals to take action, more effective information exchange and higher level of trust, openness and productive amongst team members.
Management support is vital to a successful Kanban adoption. In order to support your Kanban intiative, the savvy manager will want to understand what Kanban is, and the associated risks, costs, and benefits. They will have questions, such as:
- What is Kanban, and how is it different from other methods that I am familiar with, such as Scrum and waterfall?
- What organisational changes do we need to make to adopt Kanban?
- What are the goals and expected benefits of Kanban?
- What are some successful adoption strategies?
- What are the risks associated with adopting Kanban?
- Can you provide me some case studies of both successful and failed Kanban initiatives, and the factors contributing to these outcomes?
- What metrics can we collect with Kanban, and how can we use them to understand and improve our delivery of value to our customers?
- What is my role? What can I do as a manager to ensure our success?
This tutorial will provide you with answers to these questions and more. You will take away resources you can use directly to inform your management of what Kanban is, and how it will help your team or organisation improve. You will be able to demonstrate how Kanban can improve predictability and transparency, provoke change, highlight systemic weaknesses, and form the foundation for a process of real continuous improvement.
Strategic Innovation on Demand: The Science-Based “How-To” for Creating Sustainable Advantage and Growth
Not all innovations are created equal! While the majority result in financial losses
(76 %, Harvard), very few (under 1%) create market growth (Frost & Sullivan).
They are termed Strategic Innovations. No longer, your firm has to be a part of
this statistics! With the emergence of the General Theory of Innovation (GTI), the
only prescriptive scientific theory of innovation, strategic innovations can be
created on demand and in any market generating growth to their creators!
By attending this seminar, you will learn the step-by-step methodology (called the Design
for Advantage™) that increase any firms’ probability of creating strategic
innovations to 60 percent, thereby skewing the odds to favor those who master this
approach. You will learn all the details (the background theory, processes,
tools, principles, etc.) hands-on, with extended real-life examples, participate
in numerous workshops and exercises, and master take-home tools you can use
right away.
Building on your basic experience with Cumulative Flow Diagrams (CFDs) on recent projects, we'll
first look closer at the "link" between CFD’s and Little's Law and discuss: the underlying required conditions (assumptions), and explore workflow policies that support these conditions. If these conditions don’t exist, there has to be implications, right? From there, we’ll look at analysis performed on
several “real” project data sets (each representing 15 - 18 months), starting with developing a preliminary data distribution table, then refining it to derive actual-based t-shirt sizes and initial “low-effort to produce” but meaningful (probabilistic) SLAs. Could this help to develop policies to guide “sizing” of work items, or help determine the effectiveness of changes you make to policies going forward?
We’ll continue the earlier refinement process looking next at percentiles, and then, using parametric
statistics including exploring benefits of utilizing a data transformation for data sets that are log-normally distributed. Is it necessary to consider whether data is normally distributed or not, and how would you learn if it really makes a difference in your context?
Along the way, we’ll explore the resulting control charts created and learn how they can help identify
outliers and provide a basis for determining which “problem” work items might actually be “normal” (a frequent occurrence), and which might truly be “unusual” (unlikely to occur). Would this be helpful in how you might develop polices and processes to manage “problem” work items through your workflow, or
in developing specific and direct risk mitigation strategies or tactics? We’ll close by plotting trends of various analyses performed (counts, average lead and cycle times, standard deviations, distraction frequencies, etc.) and then pull it all together at the end to see how the analysis above might help
determine expected throughput and forecast completion times for your projects.
IT Operations & Services teams are often plagued by problems related to the constant flood of demands for their time.
This 1-day workshop covers how the Kanban Method can help Ops teams balance that demand against their capability to deliver.
Teams who build and maintain software systems can realize many benefits from a strong alliance with internal and external customers - we'll look at how using a service-delivery approach can help unify teams and promote cross-functional collaboration.
The following topics will be covered:
- Specialization and bottlenecks
- Dependencies on external groups
- Interlude from never-ending work
- Early input mechanisms
- Variable task size
- Interrupt driven work
Are you or people in your organization feeling overwhelmed with their workload? Do they feel they are not getting the results they want from the actions they are taking? Does everything seem urgently important?
Personal Kanban gives clarity to our work and our lives by visualizing those tasks, expectations, and commitments we have and helping us prioritize and complete them effectively. With only two simple rules, visualize your work and limit your work in progress, Personal Kanban is flexible enough to have already been in contexts as diverse as pre-school classes to Fortune 10 companies.
This workshop is for individuals who want to create more value for their organizations and themselves through improved personal performance. It is based on the popular book Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry.
Participants will apply Kanban and other techniques to manage their own work, and by extension to teams. Each person will design and learn how to use their own activity board.
Topics include:
- Visualizing work to uncover bottlenecks, gain clarity and peace of mind
- The damaging effects of too much work-in-progress, and how to reduce its effects
- Prioritize work so the important isn’t crowded out by the “urgent”
- The power of slack time!
- Continuous improvement that actually works
- Minimizing distractions using the Pomodoro technique
Is it fun?
The workshop is lively, interactive, with lots of variety to maximize learning potential. Gerry co-designed this session using the Training From the Back of the Room approach, which uses brain science principles to make learning stick.
What will I gain from attending?
You will leave this one day workshop with:
- Increased visibility into what you are doing - what you can see you can manage
- Practical answers on how to spend more time on the things that matter most to you
- Lightweight processes and tools you can use and adapt immediately to manage your workload
- A ready to use personal Kanban board
Performance occurs at many levels: organization, team and individual, starting with the individual. High performing companies embrace all three to reap the rewards of excellence. Executives, managers, staff, entrepreneurs, busy moms can all benefit from this workshop.
Reviews from Participants
"Creative, engaging, productive."
"The workshop is a fun ride through several Agile techniques that I can turn around and put to use right away!"
"Attend the workshop. It allows you to reflect on where you can make personal effectiveness improvements and teaches you how to do it."
"Now I can see better what I need to do and have a flexible means to manage my work."
"I plan to have my team participate in this exercise."
Strategic Innovation on Demand: The Science-Based “How-To” for Creating Sustainable Advantage and Growth
Not all innovations are created equal! While the majority result in financial losses
(76 %, Harvard), very few (under 1%) create market growth (Frost & Sullivan).
They are termed Strategic Innovations. No longer, your firm has to be a part of
this statistics! With the emergence of the General Theory of Innovation (GTI), the
only prescriptive scientific theory of innovation, strategic innovations can be
created on demand and in any market generating growth to their creators!
By attending this seminar, you will learn the step-by-step methodology (called the Design
for Advantage™) that increase any firms’ probability of creating strategic
innovations to 60 percent, thereby skewing the odds to favor those who master this
approach. You will learn all the details (the background theory, processes,
tools, principles, etc.) hands-on, with extended real-life examples, participate
in numerous workshops and exercises, and master take-home tools you can use
right away.
