Posted on October 21, 2012 by 14 Principles
It’s a few weeks ago since Lean Agile Scotland, but it was great to see a Lean Agile conference so closed to home.
We were fortunate enough to meet Chris McDermott (@chrisvmcd) at a Glasgow TechMeetup earlier in the year. He’s clearly done a stellar job of organising lascot12 – evident by who was there – We can’t wait for lascot13. He’s also been a keen early adopter of boardsync, giving us a load of great feedback.
So, to the roundup:
- Joe Wright (@joe_jag), who organises Glasgow’s TechMeetup, gave a talk on Continuous Delivery. Slides available, and also a photo of him talking!
- Wesley Gorman (@wesg), Lean into your Learning. Slides available
- Torbjörn Gyllebring (@drunkcod), Faith, Science & Rightshifting, Slides available, Updated 29/10/12: Video available at http://www.leanagilescotland.com/videos
- Clarke Ching (@clarkeching), Cash Flow Driven Development, Slides available, Updated 29/10/12: Video available at http://www.leanagilescotland.com/videos
- Karl Scotland (@kjscotland) has an interesting blog post (follow the link trail) regarding some of the systems thinking behind his Understanding Kanban Thinking slideless talk.
- Ian Carroll (@caza_no7), Systemic Flow Mapping, Slides available
- Florian Eisenberg (@fjeisenberg), Leadership on all levels. Why? And How?, Slides available
- Henrik Berglund (@henrikber), Real Teams, and how to build them. Slides available
- Matt Wynne (@mattwynne), Why agile fails. Slides available, Updated 25/10/12: Video available at http://www.leanagilescotland.com/videos
- John J Peebles (@johnjpeebles), People: Your Most Agile Ingredient, Slides coming soon
- Keynote by David J Anderson (@agilemanager), Individually Smart, Collectively Stupid – the great 21st Century Management Challenge
- Keynote by Liz Keogh (@lunivore), Respect for People, with a thought provoking write up from Bob Marshall (Updated 29/10/12: Bob’s talk is available at http://www.leanagilescotland.com/videos)
- Organiser Chris McDermott (@chrisvmcd), Does Kanban help provide Motivation? Slides available
- And to Roundup, Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei) has an interesting write up of the whole experience. Speakers night was at Vitorria which is actually pretty nice Italian in Edinburgh. He also gave a Rightshifting talk, Organisational Effectiveness – Rightshifting & The Marshall Model. Find out more here
So that wraps up our 14 Roundup of #lascot12. It was the first conference we were invited to submit a paper for. Luck be damned, we couldn’t make it due to other commitments. We’ll be sure to block time aside for #lascot13 next year though.
You can find out more at lanyrd, or via the organiser Chris McDermott – @chrisvmcd . Chris let us know recently that he expects to have videos ready soon. As soon as they are, we’ll update the post.
Updated 25/10/2012: It looks like the videos are starting to be put up at http://www.leanagilescotland.com/videos
Updated 29/10/2012: More videos available
Posted on November 12, 2011 by 14 Principles
Posted on October 23, 2011 by 14 Principles
A brief visual management tactic born out of Kanban: Limited Work In Progress.
Our teams have been limiting their work in progress for a good while now to great benefit. To visualise these limits we place physical Work In Progress (WIP) limits on our team board:
You can limit work in progress for the whole workflow, or for individual workflow steps or groups of steps. We also call the limit out at the top of each stage in the workflow, as so:
These limits are difficult to violate without someone noticing: “Use visual control so no problems are hidden”. Take a look at the following board. Someone is clearly being nefarious here:
Swimlanes
We’ve tended away from setting these limits in stone; prefering to treat them as a point for discussion and root cause analysis of why a limit is being broken.
It’s worth noting that we don’t use swimlanes for limits. As each of our work items go through the same process there is no need for swimlanes: it’s worth noting not to conflate the two. Swimlanes in Kanban had some interesting coverage at Lean Kanban Benelux 2011, with John Seddon raising the opinion that swimlanes hurt capacity. Whilst this may be true, there is value in them, which we’ll cover in a future Visual Management series.
Determining an initial Limit
Our approach is simple: keep it simple. Have the smallest possible number of workflow steps (columns) and iterate from an initial Work in Progress limit, say: (N / 2) + 1 where N is the number of team members.
You can find out more about limiting Work In Progress in Kanban from David Anderson.
As a simple visual technique to trigger these discussions “hard WIP limits” on your board may just work for you. How do you visualise your WIP limits? Let us know @14principles.
Photo: Creative commons, Michael Lokner
Posted on October 13, 2011 by 14 Principles
Last week, Lean Kanban 2011 Benelux happened in Antwerp Belgium, hosted by Maarten Volders. Here’s our 14 Roundup:
- Yuval Yerert gave a talk on commitment and energies in a kanban system. This talk included our first conference outing of our material: Zombie Cycle Time by our colleague Luke Smallwood. Thanks to Yuval for adding it!
- David Anderson‘s slides from his talk “Kanban: When is it not appropriate” are available. This is a must read for any WIP limiters.
- Yuval also gave a second talk: Large Scale Kanban.
- There was some noteworthy discussion about swimlanes in Kanban. There is more interleaved on the #lkbe11 hashtag
- Jurgen De Smet & Yves Hanoulle gave on talk on Improve your decision making by using Real Options. The slides are available here.
- Arne Roock‘s Limit your WIP! Why and how? talk slides are available.
- Slides from Henri Kivioja’s Erricson Finland talk can be found here.
- Grant Rule & Bob Marshall gave two Rightshifting effectivity talks: Rightshifting in a Nutshell and Realising Value, how to apply Rightshifting. You can find more discussion at this linked in group
- Karl Scotland‘s Science of Kanban slides.
- Patrick Steyaert gave a talk on Lean Adaptive Management. Slides are available
- Slides from Lean Startup: A learning organisation
- A talk in one photo - Portfolio Management by Thomas Lissajoux
- Alan Shalloway‘s keynote Lean Kanban is about people (free registration required)
- You can see the full track here. Videos should be available on Friday. We’ll update this roundup when they appear.
Some talks of note not mentioned already:
- When Models Collide – Eric Willeke
- Two talks from Cisco from Ken Power, Applying Telecommunications and Network Design Principles to Lean Product Development: Examples from Cisco Systems & Kanban at Cisco
- Keynote: It’s the system stupid! – John Seddon
- Keynote: Practice without sound theory will not scale – Dave Snowden
- Improve your decision making by using Real Option: Jürgen De Smet & Yves Hanoulle
- BDD: Step Away from the Tools: Liz Keogh
You can find more at the #lkbe11 hashtag. Most of the interesting chatter is on the days of the conference, 3rd + 4th October 2011. For a sense of the atmosphere, you can see this large number of photos posted by Maarten
And so concludes our 14Roundup of Lean Kanban Benelux 2011. We hope you found the collection of links to the talks that caught our eye useful. If there’s anything you think should be up here, let us know: @14principles. More next time…
Posted on September 27, 2011 by 14 Principles
A little late, but here’s our roundup of the ALE2011 unconference. This was one we wished we could make too, but instead followed from our armchairs.
To the business. Here’s our 14 Roundup of ALE2011:
- Organising ALE2011 with Real Options by @OlafLewitz . A brilliant take on how ALE2011 came together.
- @ulrikapark‘s reflections: Complexity and Feature Injection at Agile Lean Europe 2011 Berlin
- @scharlau‘s reflections on ALE2011
- @OlafLewitz‘s impressions from ALE2011
- Interesting and great-idea for more tiny ALEs on this LinkedIn group by @jurgenappelo
- @robvanlanen‘s reflection on his FedEx Days Talk
- @YvesHanoulle‘s personal retrospective of ALE2011. An introspective take on unconference attendance.
- I’m Back from Berlin by @mfloryan
- Why I Liked ALE2011, a really great summary of the little bits of organisation that made all the difference, by @jurgenappelo
- @JonJagger‘s tiny synopsis of his lightning talk: Precision Listening. Be great to see the full lightning talk, as this really chimes.
- Agile Thoughts and Things: ALE2011 Berlin: the fall of the wall by @ojuncu
- The full Keynote from Bjarte Bogsnes on Beyond Budgetting is available here
- See the resources page for more up to date round ups, blogs and some talks
- See the LinkedIn group for more discussion
I think Pawel Brodzinski took the award for most tweets: certainly a large online covering of ALE2011. You can find more at #ALE2011
More in our next 14 Roundup.
