Keynote: Why create a Limited WIP Society in your Organization?

For at least a decade the agile community has understood that there was value in Lean Thinking and that methods such as Extreme Programming could be interpreted and explained using Lean concepts. However, institutionalized adoption of Lean, with its culture of continuous improvement ("kaizen"), has been slow. There is still no recognized Lean software development lifecycle or project management methodology in common use today. The Lean idea of flow is widely accepted but the tools and techniques required to manage and optimize it have gained little traction, until recently. The introduction of kanban systems that visualize work and specifically limit the quantity of work-in-progress (WIP) have generated a significant improvement in the adoption of Lean concepts, techniques and tools. This growth is rapid and global and echoes the growth rate of agile methods such as extreme programming almost a decade earlier. In comparison to Agile, adoption is happening faster in a wider range of businesses from conservative Northern European insurance firms that failed to embrace agile methods, to startups in emerging markets such as Cambodia. This talk will look at why and how choosing to limit WIP can create a cultural evolution within your organization that will lead to a leaner future.

Session: Using Classes of Service with Kanban Systems for Improved Customer Satisfaction

Classes of service enable a kanban system to respond to varying cost of delay and optimize the economic and risk management outcomes. While kanban systems have been catching on rapidly, class of service is still a relatively poorly understood element of such system design. Failure to fully utilize the flexibility that is enabled by classes of service will affect customer satisfaction. Classes of service improve business agility by enable a team to respond to unfolding events and emerging customer demand. Classes of service can also be used to improve customer satisfaction and predictability. This presentation will explain how to analyze demand and select a mix of classes of service. It will then show how to allocate capacity to better manage risk, improve economic outcomes, deliver greater predictability, and ultimate delight customers. Dynamic adjustment of capacity allocation may be required based on seasonal demand. This and other reasons to adjust capacity allocations will be explained.

Keynote: What Is Next In the Agile World: Why Lean/Kanban Matters

As Agile has spread virally, the list of challenges that have arisen with it has also increased. While there are many success stories, there seem to be an equal, or even greater number of less than stellar results. For Agile to move ahead, it needs to expand its focus from the team to the entire value stream. In addition, a level of professionalism needs to emerge. Lean and Kanban thought processes and methods provide the basis for a foundation in software development that can overcome many of the challenges that the first generation of Agile have become mired in. While becoming a Lean organization may be beyond the aspirations of many organizations, using the technology and science of Lean and Kanban methods should not be. Lean at the enterprise level can be thought of as a progression of Lean Science, leading to Lean Management, leading to continuous process improvement. Alan outlines how Lean can provide guidance at the organizational level while Kanban provides methods at the team level. These methods are an essential component of achieving both Agility at Scale and raising the level of professionalism in our industry.

Session: Seeing what matters, using the right vision to manage transition

All executives want a software development organization that delivers high quality products with low cost in a timely manner. Unfortunately, while we want productivity, quality and low cost, trying to achieve these directly often has the opposite effect of what we want. This is not new news. Lean has provided new insights to achieve desired results such as optimizing the w hole and reducing cycle time. The leap from manufacturing to software development, however, has not been complete and has distorted our view of how to do this. While learning from Toyota can be useful, the framing of Lean within a manufacturing context has been hard to avoid. This talk focuses on what to look at to help align all levels of an enterprise transitioning to lean-agile methods. It provides insights into why focusing on removing delay can raise quality, lower cost and speed delivery – achieving the real gains we need.

Closing Keynote: Re-thinking lean, re-thinking IT, re-thinking management

In the last twenty years we have seen the industrialisation of service organisations, call centres and back-offices glued together by IT systems. Lean arrived in this environment and shared its false assumptions. John Seddon was persuaded by Deming to question management conventions (‘we invented management, we can re-invent it’) and he has pioneered the development of a ‘systems’ approach to service organisation design.

The systems approach exposes the wrong-headed nature of conventional management, it explains why so many IT projects fail and it helps us understand why so many service organisations have failed to improve service operations with ‘lean’ tools. John will outline some counter-intuitive truths, describe the systems approach to organisational change and will argue for a different way to develop IT that costs less and delivers more.

Session: What is this thing called 'Pull'

Pull means a lot of things to a lot of people. In the lean world, pull means producing based on demand. More generally, pull means putting customers first. And finally, pull can mean pursuing a passion. These definitions of pull have something in common; they all contain a strong element of observation, orientation, decision, and action – the OODA loop. As the pace of business increases and unexpected events become common, pull becomes like an increasingly attractive alternative to push.

The problem is, pull doesn’t work without preparation. Pull requires an environment that sends the correct signals, methods to rapidly detect the right patterns, and people who have the skills and training to make the right decisions. So the real challenge of pull is creating the environment, devising the patterns, and developing the people that ensure the right decisions are made and rapidly carried out, no matter what situation presents itself.

Session: Converting a Scrum team to Kanban

A case study of a Scrum team who shifted to Kanban in the midst of a runaway project. How we wrestled with problems under tight deadlines and step by step brought the project and the teams self confidence back on track. I will show how kanban helped us seeing and agreeing on what issues to deal with first. I will also touch upon the complementary techniques we found useful (besides kanban) for dealing with issues.

Session: Exploring the Kanban Multiverse

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.

Session: Lean out your product backlog with Lean Product Development and Business Analysis techniques

Your team uses a Kanban board with work in progress limits to ensure that your work flows and creates value quickly. Great. But how do you define 'value'? How do you know what to create to realize that value? How do you avoid creating an enormous backlog, a "vomit of user stories"? How do you integrate requirements work within a pull system?

When we start by defining value in a Business Value Model (or as Don Reinertsen calls it, a "Project Economic Framework") and use Systems Thinking techniques to derive the necessary capabilities we can generate the features to to built just-in-time at the pace the developers can implement them. By applying Lean Product Development principles we go beyond the Lean Manufacturing analogy and can correctly deal with the variability and unknowns of new product development we encounter in most of our software projects.

As it happens, many of these techniques are already well-known within the software domain: many business analysis techniques can be usefully applied in an agile and lean way. Unfortunately, these techniques have mistakenly been applied in a batch-oriented, siloed way. Learn how to integrate business analysis in your product development flow to lean out your backlog, until Value is the starting point of your product development flow.

In this presentation you'll learn some techniques you can apply immediately, illustrated by case studies where those techniques were applied.

Session objectives:
- Learn how to come to a common definition of value
- Learn about some useful business analysis techniques to derive capabilities from values and goals
- Learn how to integrate analysis into your team flow
- Learn how to visualise analysis work on your Kanban board

Session: A practical introduction to Kanban

Kanban is a software development methodology that implements the pull and flow elements of lean thinking. It’s an alternative to agile methods such as Scrum when you want to change the culture of an organisation in a lean/agile direction, or when the nature of work does not suit time-boxed iterations, e.g., maintenance. But it is also a tool that can enhance other methodologies through visualisation of the workflow to highlight problems, limiting work in progress to eliminate waste etc. I introduce Kanban from a practitioners point of view which let you get started with Kanban right away, regardless of what methodology you use today.

Session: The road to continuous improvement

I will tell the story of a 13-person web development team that went from chaos to efficiency in 3 months. The team is the IT pilot project of a large bank's lean implementation program. The value of the team is in being able to deliver high-quality applications and features to the bank's agency network as quickly as possible. I coached the team to implement a structured lean approach based on the following principles, laid forth by my sensei (http://theleanedge.org/?p=896):

1. Protect the customer - by implementing quality inspection walls and doing immediate problem solving on each quality problem
2. Control the lead time - by visualizing project lead time, reducing variability in the process and implementing a takt time system
3. Reduce the lead time - by visualizing and killing wait and other waste in the process

I will also show pictures of the visual management (an Obeya room) used every day by the team to manage their performance and do problem solving.

Session: Enterprise Kanban at mobile.de

The session describes how we stear the whole of the Product Development teams at mobile.de with the help of Kanban. Additionally to stearing the product development teams with Kanban, we manage the balance between Implementation, Architecture work and Innovation across the organization by use of classes of service amongst other tools. This way, the Kanban boards is the central information radiator of our PD department and being consulted for all kinds of decisions. Further we will show how we reduced the Work in progress across all teams and to which effect. Mid level Kanban knowledge is expected.

Session: The Rise of the Lean Machine: Architecting the Lean Enterprise Transformation

To have sustainable success, companies must have a strategic vision, complete organizational alignment, and tremendous leadership. While it is easy to talk about Lean principles and the benefits of systems thinking, the truth is that, sadly, many of us look at Kanban as just the next cool tool, something handy to replace or extend practices such as Scrum. Even worse, we are often led to believe that because "we do Kanban" then we "must be Lean". Wrong. This very narrow view will inevitably lead to limited outcomes and local optimizations. We will keep building the wrong software, measure things that just don't matter, and head to the wrong direction. But what if there was a solution to this mess, a way to let us see the impact of our actions beyond our teams, departments or even organizations? Would you even know it if you saw it? This presentation is about a true story of an Agile sensei who faces a software department drowned in endless fire fighting, overwhelmed by domain complexity and enormous technical debt. While he makes great progress in breaking all barriers to Lean & Agile adoption using Kanban, he still struggles to grasp the big picture. One day, however, his original work of combining Value Stream Maps with Enterprise Architecture leads him to an astonishing realization: he may have found a way to align both business and IT departments to True North. The journey has only just begun...

Session: The IT Portfolio as a Form of Waste

The standard operational model for corporate internal IT departments is that they accept requests for services from business units of the corporation and treat the set of requests as a portfolio of discrete projects that are executed individually and that are deemed successes or failures individually. The IT department adds initiatives for infrastructure support and other technical matters and treats these as discrete projects, as well. This model is rife with waste and typically delivers only a fraction of the hoped-for business value. We propose an alternative approach that dispenses with the “portfolio” notion and addresses the set of requests holistically. The aim is to deliver the maximum possible business value with the minimum possible waste in a sustainable way.

Session: Value over Velocity: From Feature Building to Value Delivery

Introducing an approach to defining and measuring business value that is simple, intuitive and built on 30 years of success. Forget user stories, points, velocity and all the typical agile terms associated with business value. Instead, learn how to clearly quantify business objectives and measure value delivered through a combination of lecture and hands-on exercises.

The approach combines the principles of Evo with the practices of Scrum to enable teams to clearly define and report the value they've delivered each release to stakeholders in terms they¹ve defined!

Session: Applying Lean and Kanban in The Enterprise

This presentation intended to provide insight into how lean thinking and the application of kanban to the software development process can improve delivery rates, maximise value and deliver enterprise class software solutions to market. The theme is very much ‘theory into practice’ picking up on how queuing theory, information theory and gaming theory have been used to optimise product delivery. Observations are made into how lean and kanban were applied to great affect at the team, project and program level using case study examples from projects where these techniques have been applied successfully. The experiences and lessons learned are both shared.

Session: From idea to implementation: Creating end-to-end flow in project organisations

The 360° project organisation expresses our vision on the future of project organisations that succeed in creating end-to-end flow from project idea to implementation. Above all, the 360° project organisation achieves both high organisational process maturity while maintaining, and increasing, its business agility. It has developed the capabilities to be highly predictable (no surprises) and at the same time maintain its flexibility. It’s success depends on a smooth end-to-end flow from understanding what to deliver (discovery), making commitments (strategy), delivering to commitment (delivery), to realising change and benefits (implementation).

Session: Using Scrum and Lean to manage Start-up Portfolios in VC's & Private Equities

Investors are pragmatic and they want to have clear overview of their investments in terms of value and risk. This “agile” presentation shares with you the initial concept and the real life feed back to better understand how agile start-ups are more valuable and more sustainable than others, and how Venture Capital companies aligns their portfolio management techniques on a more efficient way.

Session: Fishbowl hosted by Paul

Fishbowl discussion panels are a great alternative to traditional conference speaker panels. The key word is discussion - a discussion that happens strictly between the fishbowl panelists. There are six chairs set up in a slight arc, and one chair is always empty, so there are a total of five panelists at any given time. Discussion only occurs amongst the panelists. If there is an audience member that would like to contribute to the conversation, they need only get up and sit down in the empty chair. At that point somebody already on the panel must get up and sit down in the audience. Read more

Session: Change Acceptance

You can build the most wonderful solution in the world, but if people don’t want to use it, your project has failed. One could even call it Lean Waste… So how to go about this? How to successfully manage the impact and the change brought by your new system to your audience, “the user community”?

Session: Risk Management in Kanban using Real Options

In this session you will learn how Real Options work and helps you understand the role Real Options play in Kanban systems. After attending this session your view of the world will have changed dramatically.

Session: Red Bead Experiment

Come along and participate in Dr W. Edwards Deming's famous Red Bead Experiment. This classic learning tool helps illustrate the impact that a system, and traditional management approaches, can have on individuals who work within an organisation.

The experiment introduces many of Deming's ideas about management, including his 14 Points for Management. It also introduces the Statistical Process Control Chart.

Originally used by Dr Deming as part of his four-day seminar, the experiment represents a corporation formed of "willing workers", quality control personnel, a data recorder, a Project Manager and a Product Owner, each of which is staffed by volunteers from the audience.

The corporation's aim is to produce white beads. The production of beads is controlled by an approved procedure to ensure the removal of defective red beads.

After the experiment there will be a discussion of the issues addressed by the experiment, including: understanding variation in work, the role of the system on the performance of the workers, the effectiveness of managing with slogans, the usefulness of targets, annual appraisals and financial rewards, and how to improve quality.

We will also relate this experiment to approaches to Software Development and the management of software development teams.

Closing Keynote: A better method for IT

Various Agile methods focus on delivering “value” or “valuable working software” or “delivering quality code” but what if we are just doing the wrong thing righter? A more recent development has been the popularity of “Lean” thinking for IT. However there is far more to a successful intervention than mapping value streams and finding then removing “waste”. I also see a series of anti patterns forming

- Traditional IT leaves “knowledge of the work” to a mixture of Business Analysts, Product Owners, proxy customers and managers views.
- Those within IT often point to meeting the needs of the “business” as if they are the ones who produce revenue for the organisation. The customer becomes forgotten.
- The approach of IT implementation is “push” - here is the new IT system, now how do we get people to use it?

I believe decisions about the use of IT should be taken from a position of knowing the “what and why” of current performance as a system. In the Systems Thinking approach IT is “pulled”, the people doing the work understand the “what and why” and “pull” IT into parts of the work, knowing what to expect. The first part of this talk is an overview of Systems Thinking theory, and more specifically how it can be applied to IT and what benefits this will bring. Part two of this talk revolves around a series of experience reports using the Systems Thinking Method in both IT and non-IT areas within BBC Worldwide.

Session: Product Development in the Land of the Free

Creating and sustaining a system for effective product development is neither easy nor commonplace. If we were to pull together the lessons we’ve learned from eXtreme Programming and Scrum with systems approaches such as Lean Thinking and the Theory of Constraints, what would such a system look like? Where would we start? How would we organize ourselves? And what would be our approach?

The fact that so many information technology projects are still failing tells us that we should be doing something very different. This session will explore some of the things we’ve been doing beyond the agile comfort zone to improve the effectiveness and throughput of product development and realize business agility.

Session: Feature Injection: Lean Business Analysis

Business Analysts sometimes wonder where they fit in a cross-functional agile team. How do you get from a vague and amorphous business problem to a collection of user stories that the team can incrementally implement? Andy and Antony show how Business Analysts can use their existing skill sets to find the questions for the "unknown unknowns", the answers for the "known unknowns" and how to spread the shared understanding of the "known knowns". They will demonstrate how examples can be exchanged to evolve the shared understanding of the domain, how modelling helps uncover gaps in that understanding and how to incrementally communicate this understanding to the people implementing the product.

Session: Scaling Amdocs PBG from team scrum to a multi-program portfolio using Lean and Kanban

PBG, The product development arm of Amdocs, a global telco company, introduced Scrum into its processes, with the help of consultants from AgileSparks, in order to improve its competitiveness. Along the way, it became clear that while Scrum is great at the team/sprint level, something more is required in order to optimize the whole system. Lean/Kanban turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. This company is currently rolling out Kanban at dozens of PO Teams for multiple dozens of Scrum Teams. This session will describe the journey from the perspective of the coaching team – identifying what’s missing, building the approach, “selling” the change within the organization, rolling it out, fine-tuning and the roadmap for the future.

Session: Promise is Debt - A Systems Thinking Perspective on Technical Debt

So, you want to go fast, but can you go far too? In this session, we tell the story of an agile development team working with multiple customers, where the team gets stuck in a vicious circle of making promises to attract new customers, working hard trying to fulfill the promises, and making more promises when they fail. We will look at this situation from a systems thinking perspective. We will visualize the vicious cycles and the underlying dynamics of technical debt (using diagrams of effects), so the team, their management and their customers can find effective interventions that will bring lasting improvement, and stop fighting fires.