Karl Scotland – Using Agile to Deliver Value
Announcement
Rally and other Announcements
Jul 20th
I have a few announcements so I thought I’d group them together into a single post.
- Firstly, I’m really excited that I’m going to be joining the Rally team in the UK. I’ve had a good couple of years with Conchango / EMC Consulting, but its time to move on, and I believe Rally are doing some great things in the Lean and Kanban space, especially with the recent acquisition of AgileZen. I’m really looking forward to working with Ryan Martens, Jean Tabaka and the rest of the Agile Coaching team.
- Next, I’m going to be at Agile2010 and will be running a workshop Exploring the Kanban Multiverse with Xavier Quesada Allue. Its an evolution of Xavier’s Visual Management workshop from last year’s conference, with some updates that have been used at XP Day London and the Orlando Scrum Gathering. I’m also going to helping out with the bag packing on the Sunday before the conference. This is a repeat of something we did last year where we applied Lean and Kanban thinking to bag packing process and learned a load and had lots of fun in the process. If you’re around the hotel, come and find us and join in!
- Finally, the LeanSSC 2010 UK conference was a success and the materials and videos can be found on the Limited WIP Society.
Aspects of Kanban in Methods and Tools
Jun 20th
I wrote an article on “Aspects of Kanban” which has just been published in the Summer 2010 issue of Methods and Tools magazine. Download it, have read, and let me know what you think!
Alternatively, there is now an html version available.
CfP: LESS2010 – International Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems
Jun 14th
This is a belated announcement about LESS2010, whose Call for Papers for LESS2010 closes tomorrow – June 15th.
LESS2010 is the International Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems, in collaboration with the Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LeanSSC), to be held October 17-20, Helsinki, Finland. CfP details can be found at http://less2010.leanssc.org/call_for_papers/ with submission details at http://less2010.leanssc.org/submit/.
Note that we have clarified the submission requirements. The instructions should be used as a guide. However, content is more important than style initially, so submit whatever is best to give us a good idea of your proposal. Any accepted submissions will need to eventually be expanded and conform to Springer’s LNBIP format for publication.
LeanSSC 2010 UK
Apr 30th
The Icelandic Volcano Ash Cloud meant that non of the European Speakers could present at the LeanSSC Atlanta 2010 conference. Additionally, many attendees were unable to make the event. As a result, we have put togther this small mini-conference to allow the speakers to share there ideas and experiences, and ensure that the time and effort put in to prepare is not wasted!
We have chosen to collaborate with the UK Agile Coaches Gathering, are are hosting the event at Bletchley park immediately before that get together, so that anyone wanting to attend both can hopefully save on travel and accomodation.
The following speakers are confirmed:
- Karl Scotland – A Kanban Universe
- Simon Baker & Gus Power – Product Development in the Land of the Free
- Liz Keogh – BDD: A Lean Toolkit
- Benjamin Mitchell – Using Kanban to Get Knowledge and Continuously Improve
- Mattias Skarin – Converting A Scrum Team to Kanban
Because this is a free event, with limited places, please only sign up if you are genuinely intending to come!
Did I Mention The LeanSSC?
Mar 19th
I’ve just posted an entry on the LeanSSC blog, introducing myself, and talking about my involvement with the group. Its the first of what I hope will be a series of posts introducing a number of the founder members of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium. The goal is to create some more visibility and transparency of who the LeanSSC is and what we are trying to achieve. In addition we have created a public Yahoo! Group where we hope that we can more openly discuss the ideas advocated by the LeanSSC.
While I’m talking about the LeanSSC, I should highlight that if you’re thinking of going to the Atlanta conference and haven’t booked yet, the price gores up again in April. Book now while you can at $995. And if you’re not thinking of going, why not?!? The program looks excellent, and having just begun piecing together my talk, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll be bringing together some ideas on visual management kanban board techniques which I’m calling the Kanban Multiverse.
An added benefit of coming to t he conference is that the Technical Advisory Board is also meeting at the same venue on April 20th (Tuesday) and is open to all conference attendees. To attend all you need to do is to show up a day earlier, and to register for the conference and collect your badge on Tuesday. The registration desk volunteers will direct you to the room for the TAB meeting.
I hope to see you there!
http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/
LeanSSC Atlanta 2010 and other Conferences
Feb 24th
I’ve just updated my Calendar page with where I’m speaking this year so far (or hoping to), and thought it would be worth adding some more details in a post.
The conference I’m most looking forward to is the inaugural LeanSSC Conference in Atlanta in April (21-23) which is the place to find out about “the next wave of process innovation”: Lean, Pull Systems and Kanban.
If you are interested in applying Lean concepts to software and systems development then this is the conference to attend. It will have the best people in Lean and Kanban, and the best and largest quantity of Lean content. A significant number of the speakers are not part of the regular Agile community so this is your chance to see them. Here’s some other reasons why you might want to go:
- Learn lean development approaches with a focus on scientific, model based solutions.
- See how to tailor lean methods to your unique work situation.
- Find proven approaches that let development and management work together on a system design level.
- Get pragmatic, actionable advice, delivered by people with field experience presenting metrics and data.
I’ll be giving a new talk on “A Kanban Multiverse”. Here’s the abstract:
Wikipedia defines a Multiverse as the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them. A Kanban Multiverse can be defined as the hypothetical set of multiple possible Kanban Boards that together comprise everything that physically could be visualised: the entirety of scope and time, all forms of work type, status and flow, and the organisational laws and constants that govern them. This talk will explore how a single Kanban Board might visualise these multiple aspects in a limited and constrained space.
The other exciting conference for me is going to be the Scrum Gathering in Orlando next month (match 8-10). I’m really honoured to have invited to run a deep dive workshop on Kanban. Its going to be structured round what I refer to as the Five Primary Practices (see here and here), with exercises and discussion to explore how Kanban Systems are compatible with Scrum.
The other two confirmed conferences are ACCU 2010 and SPA 2010 where I’ll be talking about Five Steps to Kanban and running a Kanban Game respectively.
Finally, its the Agile2010 submission process at the moment. I have two submissions in, and am a panel member on a third. If you have a user account (why wouldn’t you? 
) please give them feedback to help them get accepted!
Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010 Atlanta
Nov 16th
The first Lean Software & Systems Conference will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA between April 21st and 23rd 2010.
Registration and the Call for Papers is now open at atlanta2010.leanssc.org
The first 50 registrants enjoy a super early discount rate of $800 plus entry to the exclusive speaker luncheon and a special limited edition Ltd WIP Society t-shirt, sponsored by David J. Anderson & Associates.
The Call for papers closes on December 14th.
Use the Twitter search tag #lssc10 to filter tweets about the event. Follow @lssc10 on Twitter for news from the organizing team.
If you are speaking or attending the conference you might like to tell people about it by adding these buttons to your web site design. If you want to use these assets on your site just paste the HTML code provided straight into your web source code or content management system.
Source: <a href=”http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/”><img alt=”Atlanta 2010 Attendee” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/lssc10/Atlanta2010Attendee.png” border=”0? /></a>
Source: <a href=”http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/”><img alt=”Atlanta 2010 Speaker” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/lssc10/Atlanta2010Speaker.png” border=”0? /></a>
Conference Chair: David J. Anderson
Track Chairs: Alan Shalloway, Joshua Kerievsky, James Sutton, Eric Willeke, Chris Shinkle, Richard Turner & David Anderson
Event Planner: Kelly Wilson
Organizing Sponsor: Software Engineering Professionals (SEP)
Event Team: Dennis Stevens, Janice Linden-Reed, Aaron Sanders, Eric Landes
Sponsorship opportunities email info@leanssc.org
Skills Matter Lean and Kanban Exchange
Nov 13th
I’m going to be speaking as part of the Skills Matter Lean and Kanban Exchange on December 1st. From their website:
The aim of the Lean & Kanban eXchange is to promote awareness and adoption of Lean and Kanban ideas and techniques. With David J. Anderson providing the conference keynote and two Parkbench sessions, the programme is structured to encourage discussion and bring together the leading thinkers and passionate members of the UK Agile, Lean & Kanban community. With a maximum number of 125 delegates, we aim to provide an informal and intimate environment where you can share experience, demonstrate new ideas and techniques, talk to the experts and generally have lots of fun.
There are still a few places left. If you’re in or around London, I’ll hopefully see you there.
New and (Hopefully) Improved AvailAgility
Oct 28th
After over a year of blogging, I finally decided that it was time to move off wordpress.com and invest in an independently hosted version that gave me some more flexibility. So today I bit the bullet and grabbed availagility.co.uk (availagility.wordpress.com is being redirected, so all the old links should work). If you see anything which looks odd, or find any links which don’t work, please let me know.
I should also give credit to Just Host, who provided a seamless process for setting everything up, including a very quick and helpful response to a support request when figuring out how to get the redirects working.
Update: One of the downsides to moving the blog that I lost all of the article ratings. Feel free to go through and re-rate any entries you feel deserve it!
5 Steps to Kanban in Cambridge
Oct 12th
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.
