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!

• Exploring the Kanban Multiverse
• Powerful Agile Mental Models
• Iteration Shootout at the Kanban Corral

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.

Monday

Mary Poppendieck – The The Tyranny of the Plan

• Plans – what did construction do before computers?
• Eliminate design loops by consulting experts early
• Design for decoupling workflow
• Cash Flow Thinking – Cost of Delay
• Design based on constraints of situation
• Establish a reliable workflow 1st
• Schedule is orthogonal to workflow
• Build schedules based on experience, not wishful thinking
• Variance from plan is a learning opportunity, not a performance failure
• Reliable workflow – output, pathway, connection, method, improvement – Steven Spears, Chasing the Rabbit
• Polaris Success – Quality of Leadership, Focus on deployment, Decentralised Competitive Org, Emphasis on Reliability, Esprit de Corps

Alan Shalloway – Creating a Model to Understand Product (and Software) Development

• 3 types of value: Discover what a customer needs, Discover how to build it, Build it

Jeff Patton – Lean Product Discovery

• There is a difference between Delivery & Discovery
• Undelivered software is a solution hypothesis (usually incorrect)
• Include discovery in the VSM
• Market demand = pull (but is post delivery)
• “Lets go to marble”
• Discovery Kanban + Delivery Kanban
• Visualisation creates collaboration
• Storyotype 1: Bare Necessity – minimally demo-able
• Storyotype 2: Capability + Flexibility – options-
• Storyotype 3: Safety – invisible
• Storyotype 4: Usability, Appeal, Performance – differentiating
• Chess analogy – Opening Game, Mid Game, End Game
• Use options when cost of iteration and failure is high

John Seddon – Re-thinking Lean Service

• If you manage costs, costs go up
• Failure demand is a signal
• Incentivising workers get less work done
• Predictable failure demand is preventable
• Lean is getting a bad brand
• The only plan is to get knowledge
• Improve flow – walk the flow
• Pull the help, keep the work
• Do “productivity” tools improve productivity?
• Make them curious

Tuesday

Don Reinertsen – Second Generation Lean Product Development: From Cargo Cult to Science

• Understand causal relationships and salient phenomena
• Scientific v Faith (Science Free) based approaches
• Faith based = Cargo Cult
• Every system has Push / Pull interfaces
• No bad tools, only wrong times to use them
• In Product Development, Requirements are a degree of freedom
• Inventory is information and invisible (physically and financially)
• Agile practitioners are going a better job at LPD than LM practitioners
• In engineering we are making economical (Profit + Loss) decisions and we have no clue what we are doing
• Quality = Process x People – If either drops to 0, the quality of the result will drop to 0
• Don’t tolerate initiative – demand it
• Chief Engineer doesn’t know better than the customer

Kenji Hiranabe – Learning Kaizen from Toyota

• Balance process control and process improvement
• Management fosters human potential
• Go to the gemba != PowerPoint
• To know and to understand are different
• Think within your constraint

Hal Macomber – Lessons from Target Value Design

• Meld planning with execution + control
• What signals do we pay attention to?
• Articulate + activate the network of commitment
• Only start work when it is in the condition to be finished.
• Embrace the contradictions of Lean
• Focus on tool users, not the tools
• PDSA – Study, don’t Check
• Creating constraints creates innovations
• Create constraints so that we can do our work
• Don’t open the trenches until you know you can fill them

Marc Baker – Lean Thinking: what is distinctive about it and where it is going?

• Pull means take the payment first
• Visual controls mean that nothing is hidden
• Standardised tasks are the foundation of employee autonomy
• Go see, ask why, show respect

The conversations in between sessions are always great at the Agile conferences, but this year, I think these conversations were the main highlights for me. I met lots of new people who I’d only previously known online, as well as re-acquainting myself with people who I usually only see once a year. My top 3 highlights were:

1. Discussing team maturity and explicit and implicit Kanban WIP limits with Alistair Cockburn.
2. Splitting hairs on the finer points of Lean (Kanban) and Theory of Constraints (Drum Buffer Rope) with Mike Cottmeyer (apparently it was a highlight for Mike as well)
3. Debating all sorts of ideas around Kanban with Arlo Belshee and Bonnie Aumann – including drawing on beer mats and using beer glasses and other implements to aid visual representation.

As far as scheduled sessions went, Mary Poppendieck gave a good talk on Workflow and Scheduling in which she nicely transitioned from a time-boxed schedule to a kanban work-flow using a form of cumulative flow diagram. Jon Dahl also gave a thought provoking talk on Aristotle and the Art of Software Development, which for me tied in nicely with Alistair Cockburn’s keynote, and some other thoughts I’ve recently had. I’m planning on blogging more on both these topics more when I get back off holiday. See you then…

I’m also really pleased to have been invited to speak at the Scan-Agile conference in Helsinki, where I’ll be talking about Five Steps to Kanban. Here’s the abstract.

A Kanban System for Software Development provides an alternative means of creating an Agile Development process using Lean Thinking. Creating a Kanban System is not as simple as adopting a previously defined process as a starting point. Instead, a team needs to come up a model of its own process which will form the basis for further continuous improvement. This talk will introduce 5 steps that a team can use to create their own Agile process using a Kanban System for Software Development.

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 slides on their own site. However, the videographer didn’t follow their format instructions and the result was that they couldn’t use them. So after some editing and cleanup they donated them to the community – in this case the Lean Software & Systems Consortium.

As a sponsor of next year’s Lean Software & Systems Conference, Software Engineering Professionals (SEP) kindly offered to host this year’s videos.

View now!

In particular, I’d like to highlight the video of my Kanban, Flow and Cadence presentation.

I have also recently agreed to do session at Skills Matter in London on the evening of July 30th – please sign up. This is the start of what I hope to be series of events jointly organised by Skills Matter and the London branch of the Limited WIP Society. While most of the ideas I will talk about remain the same, I am going to spruce up the slides and base them on the talk I gave in Zurich. The original version of Kanban, Flow and Cadence is nearly a year old now, and is refusing to die, so I’m keen to bring in some of my latest thinking.

Plans for the equivalent event in London are taking shape nicely. Registration is now open and we have had 40 registrations in the first week so it looks like demand will be high – book early to avoid disappointment! We have a fantastic line-up of speakers confirmed, and the program has now been published. The vision was to create an event which generates discussion and debate with a format that is hopefully a little different from the norm. The mix of presenter talks with interviews is intended to stir up some debate, and the Masterclasses are an opportunity to discuss ideas more interactively with the speakers and fellow attendees – more of a roundtable than a teaching session.

The conference closed with a speakers panel, including Ken Schwaber, when the question of “Is Kanban an alternative to Scrum” was asked! Fortunately Ken and I are still friends after the discussion, and the general consensus was that regardless of what we do and what we call it, the primary focus should be on doing the right thing.