RT @indomitablehef: One more time: Anyone else from Nashville going to @lssc10? I want to talk to you.. (trying to form a Lean/Kanban UG) #

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PBG, The product development arm of Amdocs, a global telco company, introduced Scrum into its processes, with the help of consultants from AgileSparks, in order to improve its competitiveness. Along the way, it became clear that while Scrum is great at the team/sprint level, something more is required in order to optimize the whole system. Lean/Kanban turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. This company is currently rolling out Kanban at dozens of PO Teams for multiple dozens of Scrum Teams. This session will describe the journey from the perspective of the coaching team – identifying what’s missing, building the approach, “selling” the change within the organization, rolling it out, fine-tuning and the roadmap for the future.

Yuval is an Agile Coach at AgileSparks helping individuals and organization ease their path to Agility and Engineering excellence, focusing on Scrum, Lean, and effective R&D in general. Yuval comes from the R&D management world where he practiced what he now preaches.

Starting 1994, Yuval held various positions in IT and R&D, leading up to VP R&D of several IT technology startups where he introduced agile methodologies, as well as served as Product Owner on various occasions. Today, Yuval is a senior consultant in the Agilesparks team, engaged with several enterprise-scale global R&D organizations.

Yuval is a practicing Certified Scrum Master since 2007, a CSP and CSPO and is actively consulting multiple enterprise organizations. Yuval holds a BA in Math and Computer Sciences from the Tel Aviv Open University.
Find him at
http://www.linkedin.com/in/yuvalyeret
yuval@agilesparks.com
@yuvalyeret on Twitter

As Agile implementation manager for PBG Division, Erez implemented Kanban as a formal tool for managing the end to end life cycle of the PDLC for more than 50 products under PBG division.
Erez experienced a lot of variants of implementation using Kanban, depending on the nature of the products, the organization and the market that the product is serving.

As part of his role of implementation manager he’s responsible for the development of an in-house tool that combines the Agile approach with Kanban, enabling complex product development lifecycle that combine Scrum teams with Lean approach in an enterprise level.

While specific business needs addressed from one development team to another vary, there are core challenges they share. To address these challenges many of us are seeking to increase our knowledge and understanding of lean-agile principles through personal hands-on experience gained from applying them in our software development processes.

Frank Vega is an IT/IS professional with 20+ years experience; the last seven as a software architect and lean-agile developer/team lead developing applications that perform structural analysis of engineered wood products used in constructing residential homes. Prior to that were six years as an independent self-employed contractor providing custom application development support to clients in the environmental, engineering, telecommunications, cable, and computer-based training fields.

His passion for learning has been focused over the last six years developing a solid understanding of lean principles and knowledge-based product development along with kanban (queuing systems) software development, agile processes, and eXtreme programming (XP) practices utilizing pattern-oriented software architectures and domain-driven and object-oriented designs. He is a member of the Lean Software Systems Consortium and active in his local Agile-Denver group, International Association of Software Architects (IASA) Denver Chapter, and Denver Visual Studio .Net User Group. See his LinkedIn profile for latest information.

Over the last year and a half we’ve moved our development teams and some of our clients into Lean development practices utilizing Kanban to deliver more value in a shorter amount of time. This session covers our experiences with Kanban and the practical applications of Lean development practices as we employed them. I’ll share our successes and failures while our 4 to 8 person teams tailored our approach for each client after determining what worked and didn’t work in those clients’ environments. You’ll learn the real-world benefits and challenges of changing to Lean and Kanban, and why they fundamentally changed the way I approach projects.

Tim has been involved in web design and development for over 12 years and is currently the Director of Application Development at Reflex Design & Technology in Columbus, OH. Tim has a wide range of knowledge in .Net but focuses on the user interface and the user experience in ASP.Net applications. Recently he has put more time into studying lean development processes and how to more efficiently create quality software. He also has a budding love affair with Ruby, and has done a cannonball into the Rails pool. In what time is left over, Tim enjoys coaching his sons’ hockey teams, playing a little hockey himself, and traveling with his family.

Kanban is receiving a large amount of attention recently. What does it offer compared to other established agile approaches? Answering that question may require you to hit the “reset” button on previously held biases and assumptions.

Kanban blends Lean thought with ideas from first generation agile methodologies. To get started with Kanban, we will examine what steps are necessary to establish a transparent, work-limited, pull system. We will highlight the perils of allowing too much work-in-progress and how it affects development performance. Once established, Kanban teams need only a few metrics and tools to monitor their performance and improvement.

Troy Tuttle is a self-described pragmatic agilist, and Kanban practitioner, with more than a decade of experience in delivering software in the finance and health industries and as a consultant. As a team leader he has mentored teams on improving their approach to iterative development though achieving technical proficiency. He advocates teams improve their performance through pursuit of better practices like continuous integration and automated testing. Troy is the founder of the Kansas City Limited WIP Society and is a regular speaker at local area groups on team related topics. He currently works as a Project Lead Consultant with AdventureTech Group of Kansas City, KS.

Kanban is being used by agile development teams to produce software faster and with higher quality than ever before. While agile works for small teams achieving these same benefits at the enterprise level has failed. Agile’s delivery cadence drives transparency which compels learning and adaptation. Within small teams, this learning and adaptation happens in real time. At scale, the adaptation and learning happens at different times resulting in a kind of intellectual version control problem that corrupts progress across teams.

Business capability analysis supports the cadence of agile development and has proven an effective control mechanism for these larger teams. This helps larger teams realize similar speed and quality results of smaller teams while remaining aligned with what is most valuable to the business.

Dennis Stevens has been helping organizations improve economic outcomes through improved technology alignment and software development since the mid-1980’s. Starting in 2000 he has been focused on developing business analysis and project management methods that leverage the incremental and iterative cadence of Lean and Agile delivery. His approach to capability analysis was the basis for Microsoft’s Business Architecture methodology, was published in Harvard Business Review in June 2008, and has contributed to improved performance in dozens of projects delivering over $200 million in value. Dennis has been certified as a Project Management Professional, in Lean Value Stream mapping, as an OPM3 Certified Consultant and a Certified Scrum Master. Dennis originally attended Florida State University on a violin scholarship and eventually earned his degree in Organizational Psychology and Development. He served as a US Marine during Desert Storm and earned a Naval Commendation Medal during Operation Fiery Vigil in the Philippines.

“Feature Bits” is the technique we use at Lyris for deploying latent code to our SaaS application. Latent code allows us to separate rolling code to production from releasing features to customers. The flow of product development work is enabled by eliminating many of the collision points that would otherwise require intensive coordination and big-bang deployments. We review the business context for this technique, the solution design, and the coding patterns we use to implement it. We present some usage statistics and observations based on 1.5 years of experience. Attendees will take home knowledge and data sufficient to decide when and how to apply this technique in their work.

Erik Sowa is Director of Engineering at Lyris, Inc. in Emeryville, CA. Erik has led product development and professional services teams for SaaS products for over a decade, first at DigitalThink (eventually acquired by Convergys) and now at Lyris. In that work, Erik has focused on building great teams that deliver great products using repeatable, scalable, and sustainable processes based on lean thinking and appropriate for multi-tenant hosted solutions. Erik has also led teams building client-server solutions and has developed computational materials science programs on massively parallel supercomputers. Erik holds a Ph.D. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley.