Hi! Just back from Devcon11 where I presented on techniques to improve flow. There is plenty to say here so had to limit the material in some way. Hope to come back to this subject again in the future. Anyway, here are the slides

You can embrace lean in different ways. You can make use of Lean tools, you can attend lean courses and you can embrace Lean values  (Toyota production system “TPS”  to be correct).

But how do you know you are a Lean organisation?

1. You define value from the eyes of the end customer
2. You have a value stream/process to deliver this
3. Management is continuously decreasing the Lead time across that value stream

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I’m doing a free webinar tomorrow together with Kent Beck & Aslam Khan. The topic is Lean software development, with some real-life examples and interesting discussions. I will be sharing some experiences with scaling kanban to larger projects. Join us! Here is the registration link. Wednesday July 20 at 1pm EDT, 10am PDT, 7pm Stockholm

A couple of years ago during a visit to Japan I had the the great fortune of talking to the CEO of Fujitsu Applications, Jun Watanabe. Before we left, I asked him  "What is the most important thing in your work?" He’s response was  "At the end of the day, all that is asked, is what have I improved"

Jun is a manager who expresses his commitment to improve the capability of his organisation. And to improve it, you first need to understand it 🙂

What is capability? It is your team’s systematic performance, what it is constantly delivering. Examples could be your teams cycle time, your velocity or the number of production bugs you are getting.

How are you doing in this respect? Test yourself by answering these three questions in your mind:

Dagens Industri has written an article about my current client RPS – Rikspolisstyrelsen (the Swedish national police board). During the past 6 months I’ve been working with them to implement a Kanban-based software development process in a 60-person project. Our aim is to equip every police car with a laptop & mobile connection to the

It’s been two busy weeks. First attended and presented at Lean Software and Systems 2011 and the week after at Goto Copenhagen 2011. Lot’s of timezones.. but met inspiring people, had plenty of good discussions and and a great time.

Many great presentations and if you have the chance, go see Benjamin Mitchell present.  Also, the   "Kanban Primer Play" (by Arne Roock, Bernd Schiffer and Markus Andrezak) is great way of demonstration real lean and cooperative concepts revolving around a kanban board.

I held a talk about pitfalls implementing kanban. Here are my slides!

Here are the slides from my two presentations at Agile Israel 2011. Thanks for attending! Keynote: Scrum and XP – beyond the trenches The Essence of Agile

Here are the slides for my ScanDev keynote "Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to be changed". Thanks for attending! Sample slides:

Here are some fun workshops that I will be co-teaching during the next few months. Join us! For more info see www.crisp.se. Kanban Applied co-teaching with Mattias Skarin, March 22-23. Mattias is a colleague & lean/agile coach, he co-authored my book "Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both". (details & registration here) Certified ScrumMaster

Here are the slides for my keynote "Everybody wants Change, but nobody likes to Be Changed" for AgileDays, Moscow. Really enjoying this conference – awesome people, awesome conversations :o) Sample slides:

Here are the slides from my presentation "Scrum and XP – Beyond the trenches" at JFokus. Thanks for coming! To those of you that weren’t at the presentation, the purpose of the presentation was: Many of the solutions in ”Scrum and XP from the Trenches” turned out to be pretty much universally applicable However, I’ve

The Bun protocol ("Bullprotokollet" in Swedish) is a lightweight, decentralized request routing protocol. It is designed to be the simplest possible way to handle requests that are shared by a distributed group of people.

I introduced this to Crisp a few years ago because we had just create a lightweight recruitment process, and later when we were creating a lightweight sales process I saw many similarities. So I did an "extract to interface" refactoring and created this "Bun Protocol" :o)

• "Hmmm… we’re starting to get a lot of requests to teach training courses. How are we going to manage these?"
• "Let’s use the Bun Protocol for now!"
• "OK!"

We have used this protocol for all kinds of external client requests for years now, and it works surprisingly well, so I’d like to share it.

Here are the slides for my session "Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both" at Øredev. Also includes the "extra" topics that didn’t fit into the timebox. Enjoy! There’s also a video recording of the whole session.

Here are the slides for my keynote at Øredev: "Software Development – an invisible proess (or The Power of Visualization)". Thanks for coming!

Here is the Russian translation of my book Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both. Thanks Mariia Yevgrashyna, Tanya Kobzar, Sergiy Movchan, Artjom Serdyuk, Borys Lebeda, Aleksey Solntsev, Alina Marusyk, Alexander Zhovnuvaty, Aleksey Goncharenko, Lina Shishkina, Roman Kononov, Tim Yevgrashyn, Yaroslav Gnatyuk, and Andrey Bibichev. If anyone else wants to make translations feel

Here are the slides from my seminar "Vad är ett agilt projekt" (What is an agile project) at PMI in Stockholm. I was happy to see so many participants, and impressed that you managed to stay awake & engaged despite the fact that it was an evening seminar with very comfortable chairs :o) "Vad är

We got some really cool workshops coming up during the next couple of months together with some of the "founding fathers" of Lean and Agile software development :o) David Anderson is the pioneer of Kanban in software development and author of the book Kanban – Successful evolutionary change for your technology business. Nov 8 –

Have you ever dealt with time reports? Filled them in? Approved them? Shuffled them around? Did it feel like well spent time? Can you imagine a world without time reports? Here’s the story about how we got rid of time reports at the company described in Scrum and XP from the Trenches. How we got

Here are the slides from my keynote “The Essence of Agile” from AgileEE 2010 in Kiev. Thanks for a great conference! Tbe Essence of Agile – PDF format The Essence of Agile – PPTX format Here’s a nice summary transcript of the session (thx Alexander Beletsky). Here is a video recording (minus the first 10

We have three interesting events coming up:

Kanban Training with David Anderson, Nov 8-9
– Learn how to introduce Kanban in your organisation from the source: David Anderson.

Kanban Coach Camp with David Anderson & Mattias Skarin, Nov 10-11
– As a kanban practitioner, evolve your skill in incremental improvement

Second generation Lean product development – as if economics matter, Don Reinertsen, Dec 2-3
– As a CEO or business owner, learn the principles and economics driving product development

We are especially pleased to welcome Don Reinertsen to Stockholm, he has been on our "people that we really have to bring to Stockholm" list for a long time! Don is author of one of our favorite books "Managing the Design Factory", and his teachings have been a key source of inspiration to other thought leaders such as Mary Poppendieck and David Anderson.

Don is keen on making us differentiate between Lean for manufacturing and Product development, and points out that understanding the economics involved helps us improve way beyond charters and improve our decision making. Be aware, you will not leave untouched.

Here are the slides from Mary Poppendieck’s seminar "Social-Technical Systems" at Crisp. And here’s the video presentation on "The surprising truth about what motivates us". Mandatory for anyone involved in managing people or setting up incentive systems! Thanks for coming!

Here are the slides from my keynote "The Thinking Tool Called Agile" from the Lean/Agile/Scrum conference in Zurich. The Thinking Tool Called Agile – PDF The Thinking Tool Called Agile – Powerpoint The slides from the value stream workshop with Mary Poppendieck and myself will be up on the LAS site soon.

Here are the slides from my deep-dive workshop at the Scrum Gathering, Cape Town: Kanban for Scrum practitioners, PDF format Kanban for Scrum practitioners, Powerpoint format Thanks for attending! Lots of interesting questions and insights came up during the workshop. Sample slide:

On Sep 16-17 Tom & Mary Poppendieck will once again come to Stockholm and teach a lean course with me. "Leading Lean Software Development" is aimed at leaders in organisations that are serious about succeeding with Lean software development. The course also includes an evening seminar on Sep 15. Save SEK 2000 by registering this

Here are the slides for my session Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both at Agile 2010, Orlando. Thanks for participating! Slides in PDF format – if you don’t have powerpoint Slides in Powerpoint format – if you want the animations  Translations: Japanese slides in Powerpoint format (thx Kiro Harada) For those who

June and July have been busy months. I’d like to share a few highlights from other speakers in USI 2010 in Paris and the Lean Software and Systems gathering in London on which I had the honor of presenting.

Long term sustainable releases with 99% backward compatibility [USI 2010]
 
In "The challenges of long-term software quality in open source" Jürgen Höller  described how they worked in the Spring team to achieve 99% backward compatibility  by avoiding revolution and using evolution, even when radical new features are fit in. During the last seven years the Spring team have absorbed 4 major JDK’s and 4 generations of J2EE.  I was sure this was possible and Jürgens team shows it is. A challenge to all of us the next time we want to restart from scratch 🙂

Learning to Learn – becoming a Lean startup [Lean SSC]

In this presentation Damon Morgan shows how they as a company now have reached a level where they continuously do set based engineering of business ideas. He showed using their Quote web page how experimenting with not so obvious changes lead to a jump in business leads. I noted another experience which I have seen –  when you get flow going, estimation is redundant.

Using Kanban to get knowledge and continuously improve [Lean SSC]

Benjamin Mitchell blew me away with his presentation. I had some seriously great laughs 🙂 But there are some serious learnings as well. Benjamin has done some great efforts in experimenting with statistical process control in software. For example, he could demonstrate that a bulk part of the product portfolio wasn’t generating value to cover the complexity it brought by.  But what does help if there isn’t a thinking process in the organization capable of absorbing these learnings? I will highlights his takeaways,  which we all can improve on:

• THINK for yourself in your context
• Get KNOWLEDGE by studying your process as a system, end to end from the customer’s point of view
• RUN EXPERIMENTS  to learn while you work

…  If you have the chance, go see him.:)

Here are the slides from my Kanban & Value Stream Mapping workshop at Agile Spain 2010 in Madrid. Thanks for participating!

Here are the slides from my keynote "The Essence of Agile" at Agile Spain 2010, Madrid. Basically a whole week’s course compressed into a one hour lecture, worked out even better than I had hoped :o) Impressed by the turnup, 300 people is good for being the first agile conference in Spain!

My book "Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both" is now available in Japanese. Good work Hiroki Kondo & Midori Daida!

This week, we have Mary Poppendieck with us. She held an evening seminar which inspired me to think about the differences between Lean and traditional project management. I also am inspired by the questions I get from my spouse on this.

I thought that it would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison between the two. I am no process expert, I am just a programmer who has been the subject of 30 years of different processes. I have seen DOD 2167, RUP, PROPS, PEJL, XP, Scrum and a few others. So this is just my humble opinion.

See also what Henrik Kniberg wrote earlier in his blog.Continue reading