Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Spouse Program at Lean & Kanban 2009

[* updated April 22nd] Janice Linden-Reed has been working hard with the staff at the Mandarin Oriental in Miami to put together a spouse/partner/significant other tourist program for our Lean & Kanban 2009 conference. Speakers and attendees arriving early in Miami are encouraged to join the early week events. Naturally, the content at the conference is so good you won’t want to be anywhere other than the Mandarin Oriental on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday . Check out the PDF of the program. Janice has also been arranging some special rates with the top rated spa facilities in the hotel. Drop me an email if you are interested. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban

Lean & Kanban Early Bird End April 13th

The Early Bird Pricing for Lean & Kanban 2009 end on Easter Monday so sign up today, http://www.leankanbanconference.com We’ve got some speaker changes. Jean Tabaka and Alina Hsu will be joining us on Lean Day May 6th to replace Aaron Sanders and me. I’ll be rolling my talk on risk management into my key note on Kanban Day May 7th. The room block at the hotel and the guaranteed rate closes April 13th. So sign up now and book your hotel before the offer ends. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, kanban

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Bob Lewis Unimpressed with Lean Software Development

It’s unusual for me to find myself at odds with Bob Lewis. I find him a voice of reason and practical experience. And as one of the few others who writes about IT management, he is a kindred spirit. However, recently Bob has been on an anti-Mary Poppendieck track with his Leery of LSD and Who is LSD Good For posts.

Bob has a point. The point is that Mary’s material just doesn’t go far enough nor is it based on enough empirical experience. It’s too full of examples from other industries and thought experiments on how to analgously map those ideas to software development. Bob smells something and it isn’t pleasant. So he’s calling us on it.

The pity is that Bob hasn’t researched who else is doing good work with Lean Software Development or taken a look at a wider range of advice. Nor has he realized that there are quite a few of us who don’t take our lead from Mary Poppendieck - me, Peter Middleton, James Sutton, David Raffo, Bob Stoddard, Corey Ladas, Karl Scotland to name just a few. Notably these are all folks who’ll be speaking at Lean & Kanban 2009.

So Bob, here is an open invitation… Come’on down to Miami and join us and learn what Lean Software Development is really all about. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management, Bob+Lewis, IS+Survivor, Mary+Poppendieck

Recent Blogospehere Commentary

Israel Gat (Agile Executive) posted his thoughts on my Kanban & Retrospectives blog and made some comparisons with Scrum.

Israel Gat also posted his thoughts on Continuous Deployment (or Customer Driven Testing) following an interesting Twitter discussion mainly between James Shore and me. What’s interesting about this one is the consideration that even if the technical team is capable of continuous deployment it is undesirable if the end customer is incapable of absorbing such frequent releases or the economic cost to that customer is unacceptable.

And Dave Nicolette’s been in on the action too, explaining how Kanban is an Agile method. This post from Dave was prompted by my Kanban & Planning and Estimation post to which he posted a comment.

And Eric Willeke spotted this blog with lots of Kanban posts… WingingIT  Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management, Israel+Gat, Dave+Nicolette

Monday, March 30, 2009

Voting & Democracy! Are they like Kanban & Lean?

In the last few days, a quote from the new book by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, Scaling Lean & Agile Development, has been getting some Re-tweet love on the Twitterverse since Jason Yip gave it visibility…

“Reducing lean thinking to kanban, queue management and other tools is like reducing a working democracy to voting.” Craig Larman, Bas Vodde

Larman and Vodde actually dedicated 14 pages of their new book to criticising one blog post on this site, Kanban in Action. It seems they find Kanban somewhat threatening. Their opinion was widely discussed on the Kanban Yahoo! group shortly after publication.

What worried me most about the quote Jason chose to highlight was the quality and stature of the folks re-tweeting. Sure it’s a snappy sound bite and seems very clever at first glance but I worry those reading it fail to think deeply about it and miss a very important point. Jason followed up with this reply to me on Twitter…

@agilemanager Their comment is obviously targeted but if we imagine ourselves outside that context, it’s quite a useful universal comment.

It seems he sees real value in the comparison. I beg to differ and 140 characters isn’t enough to express my opinion fully, so this blog post is required.

Comparing Kanban to Lean as a tool like voting is to democracy misses a very important point. While voting is clearly an enabling technology for democracy, kanban pull systems are more than a mere tool for Lean. What we’ve discovered from actually doing Kanban (something neither Larman nor Vodde had tried before writing 14 pages of criticism) is that Kanban enables all aspects of Lean in ways that are not obvious and seem counter-intuitive. You have to be doing it to discover this.

The combination of a WIP limited pull system, and the transparency and visual control in Kanban produce a focus on external/special/assignable cause variation (aka “impediments” in Agile-speak) and encourage the team to “stop-the-line” and fix impediments rather than going around them, shelving the work and continuing with something else, as is the default behavior in non-WIP limited agile methods. Kanban also exposes bottlenecks, waste and common/chance cause variation that is natural to the method of software engineering and analysis being used. Queue management in Kanban is a necessary side-effect of that variation and visibility on to queues shows the waste inherent in the variability. Hence, Kanban provides a mechanism to enable causal analysis and resolution and continuous improvement through management of bottlenecks, waste and variability. It provides an objective, quantitative management system for systemic improvement.

Other methods that merely provide a mechanism for reflection and adaption do not provide the objective, focused, quantitative framework with specific attention to bottlenecks, waste and natural variability. As such, they are less mature from a capability maturity model perspective. The quantitative, objective, structured nature of Kanban has allowed us to mature teams and improve performance very rapidly. It’s more than just a tool. Kanban enhances Lean Thinking. When you add a WIP-limited pull system and a transparent visual control to your process you enable all aspects of Lean in a highly mature fashion. Kanban is Lean Development++ not Lean Development—. This is counter-inuitive. You need to try it to experience the true benefit of Kanban. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management