Kanban Leadership Retreat 2012

This year’s Kanban Leadership Retreat, #klrat, was an inspiring event with lots of great food and drinks in warm and beautiful Mayrhofen, Austria. Long breaks, fantastic people, great conversations and an exciting un-conference program created a perfect arena for learning. As last year, it was arranged and organized by David J. Anderson & Associates. Thanks for putting this excellent event together!

Amongst the many interesting topics were:

Kanban Katas, Visualization, Systemic Flow, Lean Startup, Portfolio Kanban, Change and Crossing the Chasm.

I will elaborate on some of these in what follows….

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:

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…

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.

Improving Software Quality With Kanban and XP Practices

Defects is probably the number 1 waste in software development. This is not a new thing, it has been a major problem ever since the software crisis was coined four decades ago. Creating software that works is hard. Creating software that works and does what the customer wants it to do is even harder. And with team members fighting as best as they can to meet a tight deadline, things get really difficult. I believe Kanban, combined with XP practices can help teams deliver high quality software at a reliable and sustainable pace.

Small Changes – Small Improvements

A couple of weeks ago I was discussing Kanban with one of the managers at the client I work for. He was curious about the method and wanted to learn more about it. Having talked about the power of making work visible and limiting work in progress, I argued that perhaps the single most important aspect of Kanban is its ability to drive evolutionary change: One small change will leave the way open for other changes. The response I got was that it sounded like too much of a sales pitch. He wanted to know if I had any experience from projects where this had happened. Fortunately I had…

From Scrum to Kanban – Introducing change

Agile software development is not about whether you do Scrum, XP or Kanban. It is about finding a process that works in the environment you’re in. Finding this can be hard, and doing so certainly require reflection about what you are doing, how you’re doing it and why. One thing’s for sure, if you are doing something and it doesn’t work: Stop doing it!

Kanban – the next step in the agile evolution?

The software industry has embraced agile methods. A rising number of teams is now trying to deliver value incrementally in small iterations. This is of course a good thing. Customers get new functionality more frequently out into the market, an increasingly important factor in a competitive global economy.

The innovators and early adopters of agile methodologies were able to deliver great results using agile methodologies like Scrum and XP. But these early adopters were software craftsmen, proud developers of well-crafted software with lots of enthusiasm in addition to good communication skills. These early agile teams would probably succeed using less agile methods than Scrum and XP. Now the agile train has really started rolling, the majority has “seen the light” and even the laggards are starting to think that this might be worth looking into. Should we be happy? Or is it time to get just a little bit worried?