Marcin Floryan

First, there was the volcano in April and some speakers couldn’t make it to Atlanta so we had OpenVolcano 2010. This was just an appetiser. Today was another tasty bite, a conference at Bletchley Park organised by Karl and Rachel (to coincide with Agile Coaches Gathering), with a bunch of great presentations initially destined for Atlanta.

• Karl Scotland – A Kanban Multiverse
• Mattias Skarin – Converting A Scrum Team to Kanban
• Simon Baker & Gus Power – Product Development in the Land of the Free
• Damon Morgan from uSwitch.com- Learn to Lean: Becoming a Lean Startup
• Benjamin Mitchell – Using Kanban to Get Knowledge and Continuously Improve
• Liz Keogh – Behaviour Driven Development: Learning as a constraint
• Eric Willeke – Value Stream Languages

The day was nicely concluded by Eric’s talk adapted on the fly and a quick fishbowl session.

Some of the recurrent themes I picked upon, were:

• visualising the work
• understanding how the work works
• understanding the product
• importance of creating good relationships with all people involved, identifying all stakeholders
• integrating IT as part of the organisation (not them v/s us)
• small, small and small – defying the complexity
• getting quick and frequent feedback, closing the feedback loop
• code is inventory not until it goes live but until it goes live and delivers value
• flow – making sure the work flows cleanly and there are clear exit criteria
• continuous learning by running deliberate experiments and collecting feedback
• the PDCA Shewhart (Deming) cycle

Kanban is becoming increasingly popular, useful and adaptable as a tool that help visualising the system and thus  facilitating learning and creating a shared understanding.

The main challenge still remains with over-engineered organisations that are bafflingly refusing to embrace the lean goodness defending the status-quo.

Thanks to the organisers, the sponsors, presenters and all the great folk from the community. It was a day well spent.

Presentations and podcasts should be available on Skills Matter website.