Kanban Training Class With David J. Anderson

On February 1-2 2012, David J. Anderson will host his official Kanban Traning Class in Oslo. The first course David held in Oslo, got excellent feedback from the 20 participants. David is constantly evolving his material so I’m pretty sure that the participants at this course will get insights into some material not yet written down anywhere.

You can find the course details here:

Kanban Training Class with David J. Anderson

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this upcoming course.

Does It Matter What You Call It?

Imagine that the company you work for has decided that they want to be more agile. Great, right way to go. So they start a project to ease the transition. Not a bad idea really, make sure people use more or less the same terminology, help out with training and similar. To further ease the transition, management decides that all teams should use Scrum. Not a good idea!
With experience from both Scrum and Kanban, you know that it is not really about one method being better than the other. Rather, it is about choosing the right method for the environment you work in and being able to continuously improve.

Lean Web Development With Play Framework and Kanban

Late March this year I hosted David J Anderson’s first official Kanban Traning Class in Norway. Having David over to teach one of his classes was definitely both exiting and a great learning experience for me personally. I’ve been using Kanban for a while now and really come to appreciate the evolutionary way of pursuing continuous improvement and learning.

Now, if you’re going to arrange a course you need some way for people to register, so I decided to create a small web application for this purpose. I did not have much time and I had to do the work during evenings, after getting the kids to bed. In other words, I was in need for some rapid web development. If you want to deliver quickly I think the following is very important:

Superfast Customer Feedback – The Way Forward

Quite recently I attended the Roots 2011 conference in Bergen where I facilitated some Kanban game playing. At the conference I had the pleasure to see Fred George and 3 other programmers (including my former colleague Erling Wegger Linde ) from Forward Technology talk about how they develop software.

Kanban Game at Roots Conference 2011

Event Based Deliveries With WIP Ranges

Principle W5: The Batch Size Decoupling Principle in Donald Reinertsen’s excellent book The Principles of Product Development Flow states:

Use WIP ranges to decouple the batch sizes of adjacent processes

Reinertsen explains: “By using a range of acceptable WIP levels, we can use different, and economically optimal batch sizes in adjacent processes”

Here is a “real-life” example of this principle…

Big Kanban Week Ahead

Next week is going to be a great week, with lots of interesting stuff happening. Monday and Tuesday David J. Anderson will teach his first official Kanban Training Class in Norway. My role? I’m organizing the event and will do my best to make sure that it will be a good one.
The course is fully booked, with a good mix of consultants and employees from Norwegian companies. There are representatives from a major financial institution, insurance, telecom, media, governmentm, a software house and of course some consultants.

Fishbowl Session at the Oslo Lean Meetup

This is going to be really interesting. On Monday night David will participate in a Kanban Fishbowl session at the Scotsman pub in the centre of Oslo. The event is hosted by the Oslo Lean Meetup group and the 80 seats were taken within 1 1/2 hour of announcing it! Currently there are around 40 in waiting list for this event, so look like it definitely will be packed. IIt represents an opportunity for the Norwegian community to discuss Kanban with David and it will be interesting to see how the crowd responds.

CTRL-SHIFT-ALT seminar

Then on Wednesday, Miles hosts a free half day seminar where David will present a scaled down version of his SHIFT-ALT-CONTROL seminar (usually a full day event). Some of the topics that will be covered are:

• How to make promises you can keep
• How to better manage risk
• How to shift the culture in your organization

It looks like this will be “sell-out” too, with people from lots of different companies and people in lots of different roles amongst the attendees. I hope and believe that they will find the seminar useful, learn something new and perhaps take something with them back to their daily job. I am at least looking forward to doing something quite different than my “usual” job.

A Kanban Retrospective

Today our team had a retrospective where we looked back and evaluated the team’s experience with applying Agile/Lean methods. The reason for the retrospective was a bit special: There is an ongoing initiative aiming to introduce agile in all nordic countries and the people driving this initiative wanted to learn from our experiences with Scrum and Kanban.

Kanban Training Class with David Anderson

I’m proud to announce that David Anderson will visit Norway late March to hold his first official Kanban Training Class in Norway. The event will take place in Oslo on March 28-29 at Hotel Bristol

This intensive 2-day Kanban training class provides an introduction to Lean, Pull Systems and Kanban and will explain how established industrial engineering theory can apply to software development process. The training class is a great opportunity to learn how to do successful evolutionary change from the “Father of Kanban-style software development”

The class is limited to 20 participants. If your interested in learning Kanban from the best you can register here.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.