Are you interested in Lean software development and how this relates to Agile methods such as Scrum and XP? Would you like to meet Mary Poppendieck (leading pioneer of Lean Software Development) and Jeff Sutherland (creator of Scrum)?

Deep Lean on May 18-19 is your chance to go beyond the basics, to meet and interact closely with internationally recognized experts within this field, and to trade experiences with peers.

The course was a great success last year, and we have made several improvements to make it even better this year!

Here is the registration page with more info.

Deep Lean participants are also invited to join our Summer Party on Monday May 18, with live music from my band Indigo.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am right now in Japan with 4 colleagues from Crisp, a few consultants from BestBrains in Denmark, Mary & Tom Poppendieck, Gabrielle Benefield, and some other Lean & Agile enthusiasts. We are visiting Toyota and other interesting companies. It is especially interesting to look behind the scenes of less well-known areas such as how Toyota does software & product development.

Here is our running logbook with our agenda, notes from our daily Hansei (reflection) + links to related blog entries.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dccmt2fq_293cwxgg9gq

We will be adding raw info to this page as we go along.

UPDATE (2009-04-22): sorry, the above document is no longer public. The info there was too raw and subject to misinterpretation. I'll add more info about the trip later.

UPDATE (2009-06-27): Here are some mindmaps summarizing key observations and learning points from the trip.

One of the recurring themes on Jerry Weinberg's PSL course (Problem Solving Leadership) was "There are no hard problems, just hard solutions". Often a problem seems hard only because we make it hard, by attempting a hard solution. When we instead open our minds and find the simple solution, the problem suddenly proves to be simple.

I know, it sounds vague. But we saw several examples of this during the course and, since then, I've started seeing more and more examples of this in real life. Complex problems that more or less melt away once you realize that it was your solution that was complicating things, not the problem itself.

Here's a silly but concrete example :o)

A few minutes ago I was trying to teach Dave (5 years) to eat noodles with a pair of chopsticks. After struggling for a while trying to follow my example of how to hold and manuever two sticks with one hand, he lost patience with me. He dumped one stick on the floor and proceeded to gobble up the noodles in no time using just the other stick.

DUUUH! :o)



So despite our initial efforts, eating noodles with chopsticks wasn't actually a hard problem. It was only my solution that was hard. His solution was simple - and thereby made the problem simple :o)

Sometimes kids can be the best teachers. They are blessed with Beginner's Mind (Shoshin).

Next week I'm going on a "Lean Study Tour" together with a few consultants from BestBrains, some colleagues from Crisp, Tom and Mary Poppendieck, and some other lean enthusiasts. We're going to visit Toyota and some other interesting companies.

A couple of weeks earlier I was at QCon Beijing and QCon Tokyo, so I've had a week of vacation in between. I've spent a few of those days with my family at Tokyo Disney Resort (= Disneyland + Disney Sea), really fun! In fact, Disney Sea in particular is now on my PlacesYouMustVisitBeforeYouDieOrYourLifeHasBeenInVain list, together with Rome and the Grand Canyon.



Anyway to the point...

Being an Agile & Lean coach, I can't help but notice how things are organized - and I'm impressed! Tokyo Disney Resort is Lean!

Read more...

There’s a lot of buzz on Kanban right now in the agile software development community. Since Scrum has become quite mainstream now, a common question is “so what is Kanban, and how does it compare to Scrum?” Where do they complement each other? Are there any potential conflicts? Here’s an attempt to clear up some of the fog.

• Jim: “Now we’ve finally gone all-out Scrum!”
• Fred: “ So how’s it going?”
• Jim:  “Well, it’s a lot better than what we had before...”
• Fred: “...but?”
• Jim: “... but you see we are a support & maintainance team.”
• Fred: “yes, and?”
• Jim: “Well, we love the whole thing about sorting priorities in a product backlog, self-organizing teams, daily scrums, retrospectives, etc....”
• Fred: “So what’s the problem?”
• Jim: “We keep failing our sprints”
• Fred: “Why?”
• Jim: “Because we find it hard to commit to a 2 week plan. Iterations don’t make to much sense to us, we just work on whatever is most urgent for today. Should we do 1 week iterations perhaps?”
• Fred: “Could you commit to 1 week of work? Will you be allowed to focus and work in peace for 1 week?”
• Jim: “Not really, we get issues popping up on a daily basis. Maybe if we did 1 day sprints...”
• Fred: “Do your issues take less than a day to fix?”
• Jim: “No, they sometimes take several days”
• Fred: “So 1-day sprints wouldn’t work either. Have you considered ditching sprints entirely?”
• Jim: “Well, frankly, we would like that. But isn’t that against Scrum?”
• Fred: “Scrum is just a tool. You choose when and how to use it. Don’t be a slave to it!”
• Jim: “So what should we do then?”
• Fred: “Have you heard of Kanban?”
• Jim: “What’s that? What’s the difference between that and Scrum?”
• Fred: “Here, read this article!”
• Jim: “But I really like the rest of Scrum though, do I have to switch now?”
• Fred: “No, you can combine the techniques!”
• Jim: “What? How?”
• Fred: “Just read it...”

Kanban vs Scrum - a practical guide

This is a draft - any feedback is welcome! For minor corrections email is probably best (henrik.kniberg AT crisp.se).

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By the way, on May 27 we'll be teaching a one day course called "Future of Agile" together with David Anderson, one of the early pioneers of Kanban-style software development. If you're interested in this stuff I suggest you join us!