We have a fantastic program lined up and a uniquely collaborative
conference format.

Key note speeches from

Lisa Haneberg,
author of several books including "High Impact Middle Management",
"Focus Like a Laser Beam" and "Two Weeks to a Breakthrough",

and John Yuzdepski,
Chief Marketing Officer at TestQuest, former VP & GM at Openwave and
prior to that VP & GM of Sprintpcs.com

a CIO panel - featuring leaders from firms around Seattle,
participants to be confirmed

Think Tank / Open Space Sessions led by recognized leaders in the
agile field, including...

Luke Hohmann, Collaboration Games
David Anderson & Corey Ladas, Kanban
Brent Barton & Lance Young (of Solutions IQ), Scrum
Mitch Lacey & Julie Chickering, Getting Started with Agile
Bruce Eckfeldt & Jim Benson, Writing Agile Contracts
Mike Griffiths, Agile Program Management
Chris Matts & Olav Maassen, Real Option Theory
Arlen Bankston & Jeff Patton, Agile User Experience

On Day 1 each Think Tank facilitator will lead an open space group to
develop new material, thinking and ideas. Participants are free to
choose a single session or wonder freely from session to session
learning and contributing to each.

On Day 2 each session facilitator will present a 20-30 summary of the
findings from the previous day. The output from all 8 sessions will be
made available to participants.

Please come and join us. Enjoy the beautiful venue. Enjoy the Seattle
summer weather. Enjoy mixing and networking with leaders in the agile
and board members of the APLN.

It's a mini-Agile Conference in the Northwest.

Enjoy the great food at the luxury Edgewater Hotel. Join us for the
cocktail reception in the evening of the 17th. Technorati tag: Agile, APLN, Lean, Seattle, Edgewater+Hotel, Luke+Hohmann, Jeff+Patton, David=Anderson, Lisa+Haneberg

Well actually, it's in McLean, Virginia ;-) but from where I sit in the chilly Northwest, that is close enough to the nation's capital.

I'm going to be giving the key note at the first of a series of seminars sponsored by Valtech - Agile Edge - at the Hilton Hotel McLean - Tyson's Corner on May 22nd.

I'll be delivering a revised version of the key note I gave at Lean and Agile Sweden back in February where I examine the underlying paradigms behind agile and Lean identify the overlap. I help to set a healthier definition around what it truly means to be agile or not. It's not about examining what practices are present. It is about evaluating whether or not a chosen practice in a specific situation delivers on the underlying paradigms of agile, or continues to reinforce the old paradigms that got us in to the mess in the first place. Hopefully, I can stimulate a healthier relationship with our past and a healthier less divisive community around agile for the future.

Check out the flyer for the event [in PDF] and the entire agenda [also in PDF]

Register now! Technorati Tags: Valtech, Kanban, Lean, David+Anderson, Agile, Software+Engineering, Management+Science

Register now, using code 'd400', to see me present kanban in San Francisco May 5th 2008 before March 19th and get a $400 discount.

I've never spoken about Agile Management in the San Francisco Bay Area with the exception of my visit to Yahoo! to talk about kanban last year. So, I'm really excited to have the chance to do so in San Francisco this year. It's been so long since I've spent any time in city of San Francisco - one of my top 5 favorite places in North America. I believe it was 5 years ago that I last attended JavaOne as a Motorola employee.

If you live in the Bay Area and would like to learn more about kanban and have a chance to meet me and talk directly about agile and lean ideas for managing software engineering teams, then come along to the JAOO event on May 5th. Accelinnova and TriFork are jointly presenting an Agile Leadership Summit. The line-up is basically the same folks who turned out for the APLN Leadership Summit in Dallas. However, the San Francisco event is commercial and does not benefit the APLN. Technorati Tags: Kanban, Lean, David+Anderson, Agile, Software+Engineering, Management+Science

The next APLN (Agile Project Leadership Network) Seattle meeting is on Monday, April 7.

Who:      Mitch Lacey with Ascentium Corporation in Bellevue, WA
What:     When Working Software is Not Enough: A Story of Project Failure
When:    Monday April 7, 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Where:   Avanade Inc. ( 2211 Elliott Avenue, Seattle, WA)

More information is at http://apln-seattle.pbwiki.com/.

Bio:

I'll be in London presenting at QCon on March 11th and 12th. I'm giving a 1 day Zen of Agile Management workshop on the 11th. This is the class that normally costs $750 per participant if you have Modus Cooperandi deliver it. So it's a great opportunity to get some really useful, different and fun agile management training for a super discounted price. On Wednesday 12th, I'm presenting my kanban material in the main conference.

These sessions are essentially repeats of the material I presented in Belgium at Javapolis last December. However, the Zen of Agile Management class is a proper full day rather than the somewhat curtailed 3 hour session I gave in Belgium.

I'm looking forward to being back in London for the first time in about 5 years. But I'm not looking forward to the prices and the exchange rate ;-)

Update: Some blog comments from an Italian attendee at my 1 day tutorial... QCon (parte 1)
Update: Adam Shimali votes me Best Talk of QCon London 2008
Update: QCon Summary on InfoQ Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned

David Anderson, thought leader on managing highly effective software engineering teams, author of Agile Management for Software Engineering, and former Senior Director for Software Engineering at Corbis, today announces the launch of Modus Cooperandi, a consulting firm dedicated to new collaborative methods of leadership and management for 21st Century knowledge worker industries. David has teamed up with Jim Benson, Corey Ladas and Daniel Vacanti to create a team of experienced thinkers and innovators in management and leadership that will offer their coaching and training throughout the World.

Modus Cooperandi will be working with a network of global partners to deliver training and consulting services aimed initially at making software engineering teams more effective, productive and efficient.

Learn more... ModusCooperandi.com

Don't miss the upcoming APLN Dallas Leadership Summit!
"Agile Leadership: What is it? How do we do it?"
February 21-22, 2008 Radisson Hotel Central, Dallas, TX

Connect with world-class Agile Leaders at the APLN Dallas Leadership Summit. 
Meet, talk and listen to leaders who have applied agile principles to their business enterprise. 
Discover how to lead agile in your organization and scale agile development practices. 
Be a part of one of the fastest growing trends in the technology industry.

The APLN Dallas Leadership Summit educates attendees with dynamic presenters 
such as David Anderson, Chris Matts, Pollyanna Pixton, Todd Little and more. 
Hear panel discussions with agile leaders from Fortune 500 companies 
and participate in think tank breakout sessions. 
Network with agile leaders at breaks and social events.  

For more information about the APLN Dallas Leadership Summit, sponsorship opportunities, and to register now visit: http://apln.org/summits.html

The next APLN (Agile Project Leadership Network) Seattle meeting is this coming Monday, February 4. Arlo Belshee from Portland will be presenting a talk on the fascinating work he is doing. A full description is below.  If you attend, you probably will leave with a few more questions about how software projects could be done...

Who:      Arlo Belshee
What:     Naked Planning – Taking the Open Kimono Principle to one Extreme
When:    Monday February 4, 5:30pm - 7:30pm
Where:   Avanade Inc. ( 2211 Elliott Avenue, Seattle, WA)

More information is at http://apln-seattle.pbwiki.com/.

Bio:

The APLN Seattle Chapter meets every first Monday of the month at Avanade, 2211 Elliott Ave, Seattle WA 98121.

Learn more about what is happening at each meeting from the APLN Seattle wiki. If you are interested in coming along please drop an email to dragosd at avanade.com.  Technorati tag: APLN, Project+Management

I won't be at TOCICO in Miami this year. I've accepted the opportunity to speak at a much bigger conference on the same week, Project World in Orlando Florida, November 6-9.

I'll be giving two talks. Here are the abstracts...

Who's Managing Lunch and other prarables of Lean Project Management

We manage projects in our everyday lives all the time. We evaluate risks. We balance costs versus benefits. We understand uncertainty and variation and buffer our schedules around it. And we recognize when things aren’t projects and need a different kind of management. Is buying the groceries a project or an inventory management problem? We think of our ability to do all this as common sense. But often we leave that common sense checked in our car when we arrive at the office in the morning. Japanese Lean manufacturing techniques and the agile software development community have been capturing some of the that common sense, codifying it and building in to everyday working practices. David Anderson will discuss with some commonplace everyday examples how to build Lean and Agile ideas in to your project management practices.

W. Edwards Deming taught the Japanese World class manufacturing, how might he have thought about project management?

Traditional project management success is measured as conformance against plan. W. Edwards Deming taught that conformance to process and his System of Profound Knowledge were preferable to conformance to plan or specification. He believed that focusing on process, productivity and variation created a culture of continuous improvement and ultimately led to better economic results, whilst conformance to plan encouraged heroic effort and a lack of repeatability. Deming's work is widely admired and implemented in manufacturing and production processes. How might it be adopted into the project management body of knowledge and how would it affect the way we manage and run projects? David Anderson has adopted Deming's thinking into his work on project management and the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration. This talk will explain how conformance to process is reconciled with iterative project planning, tracking and reporting and how project managers can avoid making what Deming called Mistake #1 (tampering) and Mistake #2 (not intervening when appropriate to do so). Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, TOC, Lean, Project+World

Come see me speaking at the Agile Vancouver group in Vancouver, British Columbia on April 24th. I'm going to present my "Who's Managing Lunch" slides about Lean Project Management for the first 45 minutes followed by by "Feature Driven Development 101" slides after a brief break. It should be a fun 2 hours.

Thanks to Philippe Kruchten for inviting me. Now he owes me one - I'll be inviting him to the Seattle Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) chapter later this year in exchange.

[Download my FDD 101 slides in PDF].

I'm giving a full day workshop on Agile Management at the VS Live event in Orlando May 14 - 18.

What is the essence of an agile management? Light touch, empowerment, delegation, trust, and focusing on the correct leverage point to drive maximum advantage. Learn the Zen of agile management techniques embedded in to MSF v4.0 and the support offered through the Team Foundation Server work item tracking and reporting systems. This full-day workshop dives into the heart of how to manage with queues using cumulative flow diagrams and how to apply management science ideas to application development management.Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF, VSLive

All CMMI appraisers are cordially invited to a one-day workshop to learn more about the Microsoft Solutions Framework and the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement process template in Visual Studio Team System. Come find out how the market for CMMI appraisals is poised for significant growth with the release of Visual Studio Team System, and how to take advantage of this new business opportunity.

Gaylord Opryland, Nashville, TN, March 10th. Learn more details from the MSF web site.

Session Descriptions

An Introduction to Visual Studio Team System and the Microsoft Solutions Framework (Sam Guckenheimer, Microsoft)
Join Sam Guckenheimer as he walks attendees through the integrated functionality in the new Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Understand how Team System can support customized process definitions for CMMI ML3 and generate the required SCAMPI evidence.

CMMI: Back to its Roots (David Anderson, Microsoft)
Understand how MSF for CMMI Process Improvement leverages the teachings of Edwards Deming and marries them with the principles of agile software development to deliver a lightweight small footprint CMMI solution

Guest Speaker: Bill Curtis, Chief Process Officer, Borland

MSF for CMMI Process Improvement and SCAMPI (David Anderson, Microsoft)
David Anderson walks through a practical example of how to use the integrated MSF for CMMI Process Improvement process template and guidance. Learn how MSF delivers the SCAMPI evidence for an appraisal.

Panel Discussion (moderated by Erik Gunvaldson, Microsoft)
Join Microsoft’s David Anderson, Sam Guckenheimer, and Clementino Mendonca, and Borland’s Bill Curtis in an informal panel discussion. Use this opportunity to ask these experts questions regarding Visual Studio Team System and the Microsoft Solutions Framework. Technorati Tags: MSF, David+Anderson, Bill+Curtis, CMMI, SEPG

Although I haven't been traveling much this past few months, I will be venturing out some during March.

During the week of March 6th, I'll be in Nashville, ho-ing down and practicing my square dancing, or more likely, providing an update on my Agile 2005 presentation on implementing an agile CMMI process with MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at the SEI's SEPG event.

[Update: the SEI has published the agenda. It seems I'm on after the afternoon break on the final day. Not really the best slot. Hopefully a few people will hang around to hear what I've got to say. You can get the full schedule from their downloads section.]

You can catch me one week later slightly re-iterating my TOCICO presentation at Lean Design and Development 2006 in Chicago. I'll be presenting a more tool focused version of the TOCICO case study and examining how a tool can be used to measure inventory at different stages in the lifecycle and how to limit that inventory Kanban style.

[Update: Get a 15% discount as a loyal Agile Management reader by using this code when you register - SPKRM1899DA]

This Thursday September 8th sees the first meeting of the Seattle Chapter of the Agile Project Leadership Network at Microsoft's Redmond campus, building 25 from 5.30pm. If you want to attend contact Mitch Lacey, email to mitchl at microsoft.com.

I'm really excited about the APLN. I haven't blogged about the founding board meeting which took place in Denver after the Agile conference in July. I was waiting until we could announce the formal association and its not for profit incorporation. However, the lawyers are still working on that. More when it happens.

Meantime, I am really happy with the way the APLN is forming. There is a strong consensus amongst the founders and board members that this new organization is primarily a network of its members - a professional craft guild for agile project managers everywhere. There is a consensus that it is there to serve its members and as such the government from the core will be small and the governance light. The organization isn't in the business of competing against its members but rather encouraging the spread of agile project leadership craft. If you are interested not just in agile and lean techniques for project management but in a new kind of professional organization for project managers then I'd encourage you to join. If you get in now, you can start a local chapter and start influencing the direction of the organization and pushing the state of the art in agile project management.

The building of a network is core to the concept of the APLN and three local chapters have already formed - in Dallas, Texas, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Redmond/Seattle, Washington. If you are interested in forming a local chapter, I'm heading up the networking program for the APLN, so mail me - dja at agilemanagement.net. If you live in one of the 3 metro areas mentioned then follow the link and contact your local APLN chapter representative. Let's build a great new professional body together.

The Agile Project Leadership Network is the new organization formed to promote the teaching and practices of agile and adaptive project management. It's the organization created to reflect the values in the Declaration of Interdependence.

Membership is open. Join now and get a discount. Learn more about the APLN at the Agile conference in Denver this week.

I'm going to be speaking at a PMI event this summer. PMInAction in Anaheim, California, on Saturday August 13th. I almost fell off my chair when I got that phone call! ;-) This site doesn't exactly carry too much PMBOK material.

I've been asked to do 2 sessions. I will be presenting a bunch of my standard stuff but each of the two session will take a different slant. In one I'll be focusing on how to apply the thinking of W. Edwards Deming and statistical process control to project management, planning, estimating and tracking, and in the other I'll be focusing on the Theory of Constraints and why bottlenecks and the drum-buffer-rope solution are important for project managers worried about delivering software projects on time.

In short - two topics the attendees won't be hearing from anyone else! So I'm differentiated value add. Hopefully I can be entertaining too. I hope to see some of you there. As Orange County CA is a big aerospace and defense area there might be a few CMMI enthusiasts who want to find out more about our new MSF for CMMI Process Improvement method for Visual Studio Team System. I'll try to make myself available throughout the day. Please come and introduce yourself if you see me wondering the halls.

[Dowload the advertising flyer in PDF]

Here is the full text of the abstracts I submitted...

#1 The influence of W. Edwards Deming on Project Planning and Tracking in MSF v4.0

Traditional project management success is measured as conformance against plan. W. Edwards Deming taught that conformance to process and his theory of Profound Knowledge were preferable to conformance to plan or specification. He believed that focusing on process, productivity and variation created a culture of continuous improvement and ultimately led to better economic results, whilst conformance to plan encouraged heroic effort and a lack of repeatability. Deming's work is widely admired and implemented in manufacturing and production processes. How might it be adopted into the project management body of knowledge and how would it affect the way we manage and run projects. Microsoft has adopted Deming's thinking into its Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for CMMI Process Improvement methodology. This talk will explain how conformance to process is reconciled with iterative project planning, tracking and reporting and how project managers can avoid making what Deming called Mistake #1 and Mistake #2.

#2 Focusing on Bottlenecks: How flow, variation and constraints affect project scheduling

Eli Goldratt has long since argued that traditional Gantt or PERT project scheduling is flawed. His Critical Chain scheduling method is based on his Theory of Constraints which first grew to prominence in alleviating bottlenecks in manufacturing operations. It's poorly understood in project management circles that Goldratt's manufacturing solution, Drum-Buffer-Rope is a pre-requisite to Critical Chain and that modeling a project a flow through a set of functional operations is essential to understanding the power of Critical Chain. This presentation will explain the theory of Agile Management for Software Engineering and show how through the incorporation of Lean queuing theory to software engineering projects, it was possible to enable both the Drum-Buffer-Rope and Critical Chain solutions for use in software projects. Microsoft has adopted the use of Lean cumulative flow tracking and reporting into its new Visual Studio 2005 Team System Product and the Microsoft Solutions Framework v4.0 methodology enabling the use of Goldratt's theories, for better economic results in software projects.

I'm on the program committee for the Model Driven Development of Advanced User Interfaces workshop at the MoDELs 2005 conference (formerly the UML conference) which is this year taking place in Jamaica. As many readers will know, I've been promoting model driven UI design and development since 1999 and I've written several papers on it which are available from uidesign.net.

[DEADLINE EXTENDED TO AUGUST 14th]

Download the Call for Papers [in PDF]

CALL FOR PAPERS

MoDELS 2005 Workshop:
  
Model Driven Development of Advanced User Interfaces

Montego Bay, Jamaica, October 2
http://www.edm.uhasselt.be/mddaui2005
 

The user interface of an application is often one of the core factors determining its success. While model-driven development is gaining popularity in the software engineering community, model-based user interface development is an important line of research in the human-computer interaction community. Both approaches make extensive use of models to develop software, but currently they are still vastly independent. This workshop aims at integrating the knowledge from both domains, leading to a model-driven development of user interfaces.

In particular, the focus of the workshop lies on advanced user interfaces corresponding to the current state-of-the-art in human-computer interaction. There is an increasing demand for user interfaces providing high usability while the covered functionality gets more and more complex. Moreover, there is a growing spectrum of target platforms, including e.g. mobile devices or infotainment systems. This results in more sophisticated and diverse user interface elements, like complex graphics and animation, 3D visualization, or multimedia representation. Interaction gets more diverse, often under consideration of several perception channels (e.g. speech interfaces or haptic output) and multimodal interaction techniques. At the same time, this increased complexity often requires more customizable and adaptive user interfaces, e.g. by automatic detection of the application context, like the current user, location, or device.

The goal of the workshop is to support a model-driven development of applications under comprehensive consideration of advanced user interface features. The target application area is not limited to classical business applications and may include games, simulations, infotainment or edutainment applications.
 
Topics of Interest
==================
Modelling of advanced user interface features, e.g.:
* Complex interactions and visualizations
* Multimedia representations
* Multimodality
* Adaptability and customization

Integration of user interface modelling approaches into model driven development, e.g.:
* Platform independent and platform specific models
* Relationships and transformations between models
* Integration of informal techniques, like prototypes and sketches
* Integration of specific tools, like user interface builder or authoring tools
 
Goals
=====
* Bring together a community integrating people and knowledge from human-computer-interaction and software engineering.
* Integrate research lines from model-based user interface development, model-based software engineering, and model-driven software development.
* Compose an overview of the state-of-the-art and challenges of the integration of user interface design methodologies and model-driven development.
* Plan further events on these topics.

Submissions
===========
We solicit short papers of maximum 4 pages length in ACM style addressing one or more of the above questions or presenting relevant work. All submitted papers will be reviewed by the program committee. All accepted papers will be published electronically as CEUR-proceedings.

Workshop Format
===============
The workshop takes one day during MoDELS conference. In the morning a selected number of participants will present their work in short presentations. The afternoon is provided for intensive discussion and formulation of conclusions.

Important Dates
===============
Paper submission: July 31, 2005
Notification of acceptance: September 6, 2005
Final paper: September 19, 2005

Program Committee
=================
David Anderson, Microsoft, USA; 
Simone D.J. Barbosa, PUC-Rio, Brazil; 
Jan Van den Bergh, Hasselt University, Belgium; 
Karin Coninx, Hasselt University, Belgium; 
Gregor Engels, University of Paderborn, Germany; 
Heinrich Hussmann, University of Munich, Germany; 
Quentin Limbourg, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium; 
Nuno Jardim Nunes, Universidade da Madeira, Portugal; 
Philippe Palanque, University Paul Sabatier (Toulouse 3), France; 
Fabio Paternò, C.N. R. Pisa, Italy; 
Andreas Pleuss, University of Munich, Germany; 
Stefan Sauer, University of Paderborn, Germany; 
Jean Vanderdonckt, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium 
 
Organization
============
Andreas Pleuss (main contact), University of Munich, Germany, andreas.pleuss@ifi.lmu.de; 
Jan Van den Bergh, Hasselt University, Belgium; 
Heinrich Hussmann, University of Munich, Germany; 
Stefan Sauer, University of Paderborn, Germany 

I did an executive webcast for Microsoft today where I talked about the Lean software engineering features that we're building in to Team System and exposing through the MS Project interface. You can see and hear the recording here http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3051760 but you need a Microsoft Passport first.

For those who have missed my presentations recently and want to hear some of the words that go with the some of my favorite slides then you will want to tune in.

I'm reprieving and updating my talk from the Seattle chapter of the American Society for Quality last September this coming Wednesday May 11th at the Washington Software Association Quality Assurance Special Interest Group (WSA QASIG). If you missed my presentation last year, and your in the Seattle Tacoma area then be sure to catch this updated paper and how the ideas it contains are being incorporated in MSF for CMMI(R) Process Improvement.

A Theory of Variation in Software Development, Architecture and Project Management

Traditional software engineering methods are built on an assumption that software engineering is deterministic and can be accurately planned in advance. Recent agile methods rebel against planning and adopt reactive adaptation to change. However, there is a better way - the introduction of a theory of variation into software engineering. By using lessons from Shewhart, Deming and Wheeler, it is possible to create predictive methods for software development, architecture and project management which embrace uncertainty and absorb change gracefully. The result is a system of quality assurance and continuous improvement for software engineering through the reduction of variation.

This talk will present David Anderson's work with The Coad Method, Feature-Driven Development and his own work in the application of Deming, Lean  and Theory of Constraints thinking to the Microsoft Solutions Framework for CMMI(R) Process Improvement.

[The slides from this presentation are now available here on the Articles section of this site.]

Are you going to Lean Design & Development 2005 in Chicago? If so you can come see me speak at 12 noon Tuesday March 22nd. I need to speak to the organizers about the title of my presentation. Somehow they've inserted a spurious "Microsoft". Believe me, Microsoft is not attempting to brand Feature Driven Development. I do intend to talk about my experience with FDD and how it is influencing MSF v4.0 and Visual Studio 2005 Team System with the inclusion of cumulative flow diagrams (which will be known as Work Remaining Charts) as a standard feature.

I'm particularly excited at the opportunity to meet the Lean community and to spend some time with Donald Reinertsen who is a key note speaker on the first day. I'm hoping to get some quality time to trade CFD war stories with Don. I wonder if my namesake will also be there?