AvailAgility
Karl Scotland – Using Agile to Deliver Value
I’ll be talking about 5 Steps to Kanban at Software East on November 19th. From the website:
This event will take place at Red Gate Software, Newnham House, Cambridge Business Park. See the location map for Red Gate Software.
BOOK NOW for this event. Tickets (including light buffet) £15 if booked on or before 16th November, £25 thereafter. Places strictly limited.
January 8, 2010 - 11:41 am
Tags: Continuous Improvement, Kanban, Safeguards, Scrum, Ski Slopes
Posted in Lean | 11 comments
One of the joys of working as a coach for EMC Consulting are the regular opportunities to have deep conversations on various topics with my colleagues when we are in the office together. For example, earlier this week myself and Simon Bennett began to discuss way of talking to our clients about process such [...]
November 24, 2009 - 10:01 pm
Tags: Continuous Improvement, Kanban, Practices
Posted in Lean | 2 comments
When talking about Kanban Systems for Software Development, I always try to emphasis that the Kanban System is more than the tool, and is a System that should be owned by the team, rather than being imposed upon it. By owning it, and being part of creating it, a team are more likely to evolve [...]
November 5, 2009 - 4:45 pm
Tags: Kanban, Outcomes, Scrum, Sync Steps
Posted in Agile, Lean | 4 comments
I met up with Jean Tabaka last week for a coffee and we chatted over various things, including Lean, Kanban, “The Don”, Tufte, and Systems Thinking. One of the other areas was around the origins and original intents of Scrum. Jean mentioned an early paper(*) by Jeff Sutherland, written before the current terminology became standard, [...]
October 20, 2009 - 5:55 pm
Tags: FAQ, Kanban, Labeling, Scrum, Understanding
Posted in Agile, Lean | 17 comments
Firstly, this post is not an attempt to be divisive or competitive. Instead it is meant to be exploratory. What would it mean for the statement in the title to be true? Actually, the full statement was “People have so misunderstood Scrum, that they’ve reinvented it and called it Kanban”. It was made by Jim [...]
October 6, 2009 - 11:48 am
Tags: Conference, Kanban, KSE:London
Posted in Lean | 1 comment
I ended up making notes at the Lean & Kanban UK Conference with good old fashioned pen an paper. Rather than try and write up those notes into something coherent and meaningful, I have decided to write them up in the style of a twitter stream. These are the things I would have tweeted if [...]
September 25, 2009 - 8:43 am
Tags: Kanban, Practices, XP
Posted in Lean | 13 comments
During recent discussions with XP folks on the topic of Kanban, it occurred to me that based on my understanding, XP can be described in terms of a Kanban System for Software Development. This is an attempt to do that, on the basis that it might be useful in helping teams understand Kanban concepts. I [...]
August 21, 2009 - 11:19 am
Tags: Agile2009, Conference, Kanban, Scan-Agile
Posted in Announcement | No comments
I’m going to be at Agile 2009 next week in Chicago. I’m not presenting any sessions this year, but I’ll be hanging around the Kanban stand at the Freshers Fair, and probably spending some time in Open Jam to hopefully catch up with people in person while I have a chance.
I’m also really pleased to [...]
August 14, 2009 - 2:21 pm
Tags: FAQ, Iteration, Kanban
Posted in Lean | 2 comments
There has been some recent discussion on the blogoshpere and twitterverse about the relationship between Kanban Systems for Software Development and the concept of iteration. The often raised concern that a Kanban System is “Waterfall 2.0” came up again, along with the suggestion that a Lean perspective might view iteration as rework, and as a [...]
July 28, 2009 - 1:09 pm
Tags: Conference, Kanban, KFC Development, KSE:Miami
Posted in Announcement, Lean | No comments
This is the announcement from David Anderson on his blog:
After some delay while we arranged for hosting, the videos from the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference in Miami are now available.
I need to thank InfoQ for making all of this happen. As a media sponsor, InfoQ intended to use these videos together with the presentation [...]
Mark Stringer gave me some good feedback recently, that I clearly hadn’t described what I meant be Cadence at the recent miniSPA conference. In order to try and correct that, I thought I’d try and clarify with a blog post that it not simply variable length iterations.
The purpose of a cadence is to establish a [...]

My name is Karl Scotland, and this is where I'll publish my thoughts and experiences on using agile software development methods and practices such as XP, Scrum and in particular Kanban Systems for Software Development.
I'm currently working as a Agile Coach for EMC Consulting (UK) - the consultancy formerly known as Conchango - and am a founder member of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium.