Paul Rayner is talking on “Measure for Measure – Lean Principles for Effective Metrics and Motivation“.
This presentation explores the nature of motivation and the place of metrics and measurement in software development, and how lean software development principles and practices shed light on motivation and metrics and how they can be used to support deep organizational improvement. We will examine the nature of motivation in terms of the four intrinsic rewards that drive positive engagement, and also how certain approaches to measuring and managing performance lead to organizational dysfunction. We will also show how the application of lean principles such as building quality into the product, respect for people and optimizing the whole enable more effective approaches to motivation and metrics in software development.
Paul Rayner is a Denver-based independent consultant with more than twenty years of software development and consulting experience. His company, Virtual Genius LLC, helps organizations architect and implement well-crafted enterprise software solutions using agile development principles and practices. Paul is the founder and president of the Denver chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) and an activist for innovation and improvement in the agile, .NET and IT architect communities in Colorado. He holds graduate degrees in computing science, theology and philosophy, and writes with an Australian accent about software development at http://www.virtual-genius.com and about the intersection of faith and work at http://www.rayneronline.com/blog.
Ken Pugh is speaking on “Determining Business Value“.
Lean focuses on delivering business value to the customers as rapidly as possible. On agile projects, story points are often used to estimate development effort . However to concentrate on delivering business value, we must be able to place a business value on user stories. Through lecture and interactive exercises, Ken Pugh explains how to estimate and track business value. He presents two methods for quickly estimating business value for features and stories. He shows the relationships between business values and story points and how to chart business value for progress tracking. By the end, you’ll be able to use business value to focus both the customers and the developers on the most important requirements.
Ken Pugh (ken.pugh@netobjectives.com) is a fellow consultant with Net Objectives. He helps companies transform into agile practices through training and coaching. His particular interests are in communication (particularly communicating requirements), delivering business value, and using lean principles to deliver high quality quickly. He also trains, mentors, and testifies on technology topics ranging from object-oriented analysis to embedded systems. He is author of several books, including the 2006 Jolt Award winner Prefactoring and an upcoming book, Lean-Agile Acceptance Test Driven Development.He has presented at numerous national conferences, including Software Development, Best Practices, Better Software, Agile Development Practices, and AgileAlliance.
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Mary Poppendieck will speak on “What’s Wrong With Targets? How Policy Deployment differs from Management by Objectives“.
For years, common sense in Western Management thinking has dictated that the way to get something done in an organization is to set performance targets and hold people accountable for achieving those targets. But leaders in lean organizations have a mindset that defies this common wisdom. They prefer to identify the ultimate goal (true north) and spend their time helping people navigate in that direction. They are neither “hands‐off” nor “hands‐on” – they focus on developing the people and systems that are capable of delivering superior results. Policy Deployment in a lean organization is like navigating a ship – it starts with an understanding of the final destination, but leaders don’t forget that it’s their job to steer the ship along the way.
Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed software development, supply chain management, manufacturing operations, and new product development. She spearheaded the implementation of a Just‐in‐Time system in a 3M video tape manufacturing plant and led new product development teams, commercializing products ranging from digital controllers to 3M Light Fiber™.
Mary is a popular writer and speaker, and coauthor of the book Lean Software Development, which was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. A sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development, was published in 2006. A third book, Leading Lean Software Development, was published in November 2009.
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Richard Hensley is talking on “A Story about McKesson ADM Business Development“.
We proposed to create a software as a service endeavor as an experiment in software business done a new way at McKesson. We theorized that the principles behind current software methodologies, specifically SCRUM could be instilled into the whole business so that value could be delivered significantly faster and of better quality when compared to our corporate peers. We predicted that we could deliver a live revenue producing customer with the business in less than one year from the time of funding. We tested by executing our funded business plan. To our great relief, the theory was largely correct. The presentation will cover the steps and missteps taken along the way, and detail the results of our ongoing experiment, including our kanban implementation.
Richard Hensley is a 25 year veteran of the healthcare information technology industry. Richard has built systems to support the healthcare industry including retail and hospital pharmacies, prescription insurance claims, hospital based and ambulatory clinical laboratories, insurance utilization and authorization management, hospital patient accounting, and hospital clinical documentation. Richard’s role in these products has progressed along the software engineering career path. For the last 15 years, Richard has been in technical leadership roles on various products. Richard’s latest endeavor is to guide McKesson along the path of being a better software product development organization. Richard is the engineering director for the ADM business.
Richard is also involved with the McKesson office of the CTO. In that role, he is involved McKesson-wide activities including technical due diligence for merges and acquisitions, technology convergence initiatives, technology adoption initiatives, technology acquisition initiatives, and process adoption initiatives.
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Ryan Martens will talk about “PDCA: Beyond Simple Inspect and Adapt“.
Lean and Kanban focus on practices of continuous flow of product delivery. Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) is a Lean discipline that moves beyond inspect and adapt of Agile team-level processes. At a corporate level, PDCA provides guidance for strategy as well as problem-solving work. In 2009, I led Rally’s move to PDCA for the company’s strategy process at both the annual and quarterly levels. My primary guide was Pascal Dennis’s “Getting the Right Things Done”. In this experience report, I share Rally’s PDCA first year of adoption: where we started, how this impacted our corporate behaviors, and where we are now. I want to share Rally’s story to compel participants to embrace PDCA and get good at it. I ask each participant to come with its organization’s #1 goal and success criteria. I will close with a planning A3 exercise from Pascal’s book.
The CTO and founder of Rally Software, Ryan Martens began his career in software in 1985 while in college and has broad industry experiences with BEA Systems, US West/Qwest Communications, BDM, and three start-ups. As Rally’s CTO, he is a lean/agile consultant, blogger, portfolio manager, technical operations manager and senior sales resource. Ryan is known for his triple bottom-line thinking as well as his farm fresh eggs, and his love for skiing, fishing, and biking with his family in Colorado.
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Siddharta Govindaraj will speak on “A Startup Journey: Evolving from ad-hoc to Agile to Kanban“.
This experience report describes a period of 6 years in two startup companies that I was involved with.
The first part covers the period from 2004 to 2006 when I was working with a startup based out of Singapore. I explain how we moved from doing ad-hoc development to adopting Scrum. Adopting Scrum was a big improvement over our previous ad-hoc approach but Scrum also led us to make some classic mistakes (from a lean point of view).
The second part covers the period from 2007 to 2009 when I started my own company in India. The company was started with Scrum right from the beginning. I explain how we evolved from vanilla Scrum to Lean and Kanban.
My primary interest is in improving the way software is delivered. I take great interest in lean and agile software development methodologies. I am also interested in the social aspects of software development and how it relates to the technical aspects. I started a company, Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd, to work further in the area of software process.
I help conduct Lean and Agile software development events and seminars in Chennai, India through the Chennai Agile User Group. I am also a part of the Agile Software Community of India (ASCI) and help organise ASCI events in Chennai.
I’m also one of the organizers of Proto.in, a bi-annual event that showcases startup companies to an audience of venture capitalists, technologists and media, and the co-organizer of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club, a place where entrepreneurs from Chennai meet once a month.
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Kelley Horton will talk on “The Power of Visibility: Driving a Lean-Agile Transition with Visual Controls“.
A Charlotte based healthcare quality and cost improvement organization (Premier Inc. healthcare alliance, CITS Division) has made a large transition to Lean-Agile. One of the key drivers was gaining organizational buy-in to the power of minimizing WIP. The Program Management Office made the decision early on that queues of work must first be seen before they could be managed. This experience report provides examples of how visibility into organizational WIP allowed business stakeholders to create a portfolio view of continuously prioritized business initiatives. The dashboards and visual controls that managed this work ultimately helped the teams continuously decompose work into right-sized deliverable increments. This allowed predictable release planning by the business, and allowed the work to be pulled into focus by development teams for incremental delivery. What emerged was the ability to “see” flow through the value stream.
Kelley Horton is Director of the Corporate IT Program Management Office for the Premier Inc. healthcare alliance (www.premierinc.com). She has program management and process improvement expertise with over 15 years of experience in creating and leading Program/Project Management offices for product and application development organizations as well as implementing and improving Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) processes.
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John Goodsen will talk about “What’s Next for Electronic Kanban? Encouraging Innovation in Electronic Kanban Tools“.
In the last few years, the notion of Kanban for Software Development has become the latest rage in Agile evolution. During this time, I’ve been experimenting with collaborative web tools for distributed kanban teams, resulting in radtrack, an open source kanban web application. As I learned kanban and used radtrack as my coding dojo along the way, I’ve basically re-written it from scratch twice as I wrestled with how iterations might fit into a Kanban world. The end result is that I’ve come to accept that iterations in product development introduce significant waste, both in tool complexity and associated process complexity. This interactive presentation/workshop will take particpants through a very brief history of kanban tools and then request your involvement in an interactive brainstorming session on what the future of kanban tools might bring.
The focus of this interactive session will be more of a paper prototyping, workshop format, designed to elicit new visualizations from kanban visionaries on new ways to visualize and encourage lean team concepts across geographic boundaries with electronic kanban tools. Participants will be asked to break into focus groups and help brainstorm directions for the next generation of electronic kanban systems. I expect to write up the results of these brainstorming sessions as a joint activity with all workshop participants and publish the results as a mechanism to stimulate new electronic kanban tool innovations with both commercial and open source tool vendors alike.
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Scott Bellware will talk on “Lean Web Design – Living with Specialization in Rapid Startups“.
Web designers are highly-specialized professionals. We loose a lot of productivity due to the effects of this specialization, whether through rework, scrap work, relearning, or missed expectations. Rapid startups expect to be up and running within two months, from the start of development work to business launch. Web designers are critical members of web startup teams, and learning to deal with web design specialists is vital to a rapid startup’s ability to sustain its pace. This presentation talks about two web startups that applied lean thinking and pull and flow to this particular challenge, and the techniques and understanding that came from the experience.
Scott Bellware is a software product designer, builder, and manager living in Austin, TX. Scott works with web startups on rapid new product development as well as with IT shops to improve the quality of their products, processes, and performance. Scott is the founder of the Lean Software Austin group, and has founded and helped organize numerous professional groups and events regionally, nationally, and internationally. He speaks at software industry conferences and teaches Agile and Lean development in workshops in the US, Canada, and Europe. Scott has served as the chairman of the International .NET Association’s Speaker Committee and is a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award. Scott is an activist, an organizer, explorer, and teacher. Scott has been caught on several occasions replacing the periods of highly-secured assertions with question marks.
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Alisson Vale will talk about “Making the Work Visible“.
That is what we have been doing at Phidelis since Kanban has become essential in our way to develop and delivery software. We have observed that hidden characteristics of our working system start to reveal once we discover clever ways to put the work, the process, and the communication resulted from collaboration, visible.
We do that by using an electronic application that merges tracking data with visual elements in a social and collaborative perspective. The process and the representation of the work itself are presented using Lean concepts and terminology. The application absorbs what sticks in the real process, creating an interesting way to forge a management system based on experience rather than prescription.
On this presentation I will explore the way that we design our processes using these elements. How do we mix signs and data to create visual information? How do we put visible measures near visible work so we can influence the whole system in a positive direction? How do we make the collective efforts explicit in a way that we constantly reinforce the need for collaboration on a daily basis? How do we use Lean and Kanban concepts to give us not only a direction, but also a clear goal to conduct the system and its evolution?
Alisson Vale is founder of Phidelis Technologies. With more than 15 year of experience with software development and at least 8 years leading and coaching software projects, he is an Agile enthusiast in Brazil, where he has a strong level of participation by writing articles, doing presentations and debating on discussion forums. Today he is a technical coach and Product Leader at Phidelis, where a lot of ideas and techniques are constantly challenged and applied in real world scenarios.
