Wednesday, May 16, 2012

                                                                                            By Dominica DeGrandis

A collection of incredibly impressive thinkers and leaders from around the world has converged in Boston for the Lean Software & Systems Conference. This issue covers some of the many takeaways ….

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Tuesday, May 08, 2012

                                                                                            By Dominica DeGrandis

Next week the Lean Software and Systems conference in Boston will undoubtedly supply a plethora of buzz.  Until then, here’s a series of blog posts from some prolific writers.

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Monday, April 30, 2012

Yesterday’s post was inspired by my recent bike rides around my home neighborhood in Clallam County, Washington. I typically ride the last few miles home on the Discovery Trail - a bike path crafted out of an abandoned railway line that ran from Port Angeles to Sequim and on toward Discovery Bay. About 5 miles from home, the path is cut by a gravel road inside the Carlsborg, WA, industrial park. Recently, the road was resurfaced with rather course gravel, some of the small rocks measuring 1”-2” in size - fine for trucks, not so easy for a racing bike with 25mm tires. When I hit the road spinning at about 20 mph, I had only few seconds before hand to recognize the resurfacing work. I didn’t anticipate how chunky some of it was going to be. As I hit it my bike started to shake violently and bounce left and right.

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My father was a real engineer. He used to get his hands dirty with machinery. He was a machinist (a turner) by trade. He spent much of the latter part of his career commissioning plant and machinery at an explosives factory. Often he or his colleagues would hand craft some of the manufacturing tools with their own machine tools. He spent a lot of time thinking about tolerances. The tolerance in the actual size of a machined part, or a manufactured component, from its specification. These are typical measured in microns, or in his younger days, fractions of an inch. In his broad Glasgow brogue he’d talk of “thous.” Precision was important but like all engineers he was a pragmatist. Perfection wasn’t necessary - near enough was good enough. I worry that recent trends in the Agile community are losing sight of the inherent pragmatism seen in engineers like my father…

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Thursday, April 26, 2012

When we announced the Accredited Kanban Training program in Lean Kanban University in February some people initially believed we were announcing a certification scheme for individuals taking Kanban training. We were not! Instead we were introducing standards into Kanban training by introducing a defined curriculum and accredited training material against that curriculum. We were also providing a professional designation of Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) to those individuals that we believed to be qualified to teach the curriculum adequately. We were “certifying” trainers.

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