I’m at XP2008 in Limerick this week. Today was pretty quiet as its all tutorials for the first couple of days, which cost extra, so I didn’t actually go to anything. However, I did hang around and catch up with some old friends.
In particular, I had an interesting chat with Tom Poppendieck about my experiences with kanban systems. Tom felt that while a kanban system was great for small pieces of work such as sustaining engineering, it wasn’t so suitable for larger pieces of work such as new product development. This is counter to my experience that a kanban system using larger MMFs as the kanban actually helps the focus on delivering value with a reduced cycle time.
While generally talking about Lean, Tom also recommended a new book, Ready, Set, Dominate: Implement Toyota’s Set-Based Learning for Developing Products and Nobody Can Catch You by Michael N. Kennedy, Kent Harmon. Another one to add to the reading list.