Yesterday Lean-Kanban University (LKU) announced the Lean-Kanban University Accredited Kanban Training Program. Today my employer Avega Group AB has also announced it’s Corporate Charter Membership and Advisory Board membership. I’m proud to represent Avega Group AB and will their first accredited Kanban Trainer.

So what is this Accredited Kanban Training Program all about?

The goal of the program is to provide high quality training of the Kanban Method world wide.

Trainee’s (end users) taking accredited training will receive a LKU membership and will have the ability to download proof of completion for all accredited training they attend.

As of today the program is not a trainee(end user) certification scheme. But as Mattias Skarin, a fellow Advisory Board member states in the press release:

“We on the Advisory Board only value certification if it validates genuine skills”. 

The decision on certification has therefor been deferred until a possible future date when we find an appropriate way to let both Kanban trainees and Kanban practitioners validate their genuine skills in the Kanban Method. 

The LKU Accredited Kanban Training Program will establish the quality of provided Kanban training based on the status of following three parts:

1. The organization who will provide the training
2. The individual trainer who will run the training class
3. The training curriculum that will be used in the class

The member organizations, their trainers and their training curriculums must meet the established criteria in all three areas in order to call their Kanban training “accredited” under the terms of the program.

This program is not closed for new members. Interested organizations are invited to join the Lean-Kanban University Accredited Kanban Training Program.

To become an accredited Kanban trainer you must attend a train the trainer class(or equivalent) provided by LKU or David J. Anderson & Associates, Inc.

Training material can be accredited by the LKU if it meets the established training curriculum. Currently, training materials from the corporate members are being assessed for accreditation against the agreed defined curriculum. Accredited Training material can be licensed from other member organizations on a case by case basis.

I believe this is a great step to further grow the Kanban community and spread the word of the Kanban Method as an evolutionary method to improve knowledge work process. 

In Scrum the main forces are the time boxed Sprints and the cross-functional team. In the Kanban method the main forces are visualizing work and limit the work-in-process (WIP).

Scrum

In Scrum the main forces for improvements are achieved by the time boxed Sprints and the cross-functional team.

It is in the time boxed Sprint the team are supposed to build a potential releasable increment of your product. By setting a fixed time box in which a product increment shall completed including all steps like analysis, design, development and testing will force the increments to be small enough to fit the time box. This will most often reduce risk by the smaller steps with validation of the increment at the end of the time box in the Sprint Review.

The members of the cross-functional Scrum team are the only ones that should work on the product increment. This will force the organization to have all the necessary competence in the team so it can deliver the intended product increment.

The Kanban method

In the Kanban method the main forces for improvements are achieved by visualizing work and limit the work-in-process.

Visualizing and making the work visible is used to make people in the process aware of how work is done and the amount of work that is in the process. Humans are very good at processing visual information and making meaning of it as a very large part of the human brain is dedicated to it. The saying that a picture says more than thousand words is a very good description how the brain works. By visualizing and making the work visible the Kanban method the created understanding and understanding can force the organization to make improvements of how work is done.

The goal of limiting work-in-process is to create an even and continuous flow of work. This is done by reducing the work-in-process in small steps over time. This will force process problems to the surface and together with the visualization it will be visible. Limiting the amount of work in the process will often reduce risk as less work is done in parallel and the focus on getting work done before new work is started.

Different forces for different contexts

Scrum and the Kanban method use different forces to achieve this same goal. Depending on the context the forces will have different catalytic effects on your organization. Based on your current context choose one or the other or combine them to achieve the goal of your organization.

The getKanban Board Game is board game like Monopoly but instead of trying to buy real estate and make your competitors go bankrupt in the getKanban Board Game you try to make your software process flow and maximize your net profit.

The goal of the getKanban game is to maximize the net profit by attracting subscribing customer for your software. You attract new customers by making new features available for the customer. Every third day of the game you will charge your existing and new customer. The team with the highest net profit at the end of the game day 21 will be the winning team.

To maximize your profit you need to manage your software development process by managing what work should be do by who and when. Work in the game comes in four different categories of story (or four classes of service):

• Standard – product features which attract subscribers
• Intangible – work that needs to be done, but that does not directly attract subscribers
• Fixed Delivery Date – work to be deliver before their due dates
• Expedite – work that need to done as quickly as possible

To help you manage the process you will learn how to create and use a Cumulative Flow Diagram and a Control Chart.

During the game different event will occur that the team has to handle by making prioritizations and resource allocation decisions.

This game is a great way to learn many of the mechanics of a kanban powered process.

It has been described as the most effective way to teach Kanban.

I do agree that this is truly a great tool to learn the basics of how a kanban powered process can be managed. The game has many learning opportunities and serves as great reference for further discussions and training. I highly recommend this game.

If you want to play it in your company please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Here are some example charts, results and pictures from my classes

Start with why, let the adaptive system self organize and have the teams find the answers by them self.

LESS 2011 was the second International Conference on Lean Enterprise Software and Systems (LESS). LESS is a non-profit collaboration between the Lean Software and Systems Consortium and Mälardalen University. This year LESS 2011 was held at Clarion Sign Hotel in Stockholm between 30^th October to 2^nd November

This year there was four main tracks: Transforming Organizations, Lean and Agile Product Development, Complexity and Systems Thinking and Beyond Budgeting.

My goal was to focus on Complexity and Systems Thinking and Beyond Budgeting.

I was also very much looking forward to hear Steve Denning speak about Radical Management as I, after so many hurdles, was able to bring him to the conference and give everyone a copy of his latest book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management

Pre Conference Day

This part of the conference had been very poorly announced so we where only four people who turned up but we had some interesting discussions about transforming organizations to a Lean mindset. Thank you Alan Shalloway, Karl Scotland and Frode Odegard

The rest of the day was spent on folding name tags and packing conference bags with Jean Tabaka and Karl Scotland

Day 1

I started the day by facilitating the LESS 2011 Stockholm Lean Coffee event.

A short introduction by the conference organizers.

Keynote: Bjarte Bogsnes: Beyond Budgeting – a new management model for new business realities

This keynote by Bjarte Bogsnes was a well presented keynote with lots of interesting stuff about what Beyond Budgeting is really about. Here is some of my notes.

Bjarte used an interesting metaphor where he compared a cross road with traffic light to a round about.

The traffic light system is often based on historical data and regulated by pre set intervals.

A round about on the other hand is self regulated system based on some simple rules and are regulated based on the current situation.

Beyond Budgeting is event driven model in contrast to traditional calendar based budgeting model. How would you react if your bank would only interact with you during month of the year? What if you had to make all your banking decisions during the month of October? This is more or less what the yearly budget cycle is for a company.

Some examples on how Stateoil principles

• Performance is about performing better than the ones you compare yourself with
• Do the right thing – use sound business judgment for all decisions.
• Resources are made available or allocated on a case by case basis
• Forward looking and action oriented
• Performance evaluation is a holistic assessment of behaviors and results
• Alignment from strategy to people with flexibility and freedom

You don’t lose weight by weighing your self

Ola Ellnestam: Real Options Applied

Olle Ellnestam held an interesting session about Real Options.

Real Options is about "deferring decisions to the last responsible moment". By deferring decisions and avoiding early commitments, you can gain flexibility in the choices you have later.

Olle exemplified this with a business trip where he hedged his traveling options due to the ash cloud. He had a plan ticket, a train ticket and his car available to make the trip. The different options expired at different times and had different costs. He could make the traveling decision just-in-time based on all available information instead of committing early.

When we look back, things appear to have a clear path – this can’t be applied to the future  

I liked the presentation even if he was a little short on time at the end.

Carl Savage: Overcoming Education Inertia

Carl Savage had a great presentation. He talked about how you need to focus on the real customer and the needs of the customer. In his case it was the medical students. Is the medical training done in such a way that the students really learn what they need to know.

Great session. 

Ari-Pekka Skarp: Coaching in Complex Environments

Sorry Ari-Pekka, I did not understand what you wanted to tell us with this session.

Update: After reading Ari-Pekka’s blog post about this talk I got the message he wanted to communicate. This is truly an interesting topic. You can read the blog post here

Jurgen Appelo: Complexity Thinking or Systems Thinking ++ ?

Jurgen is an entertaining speaker with great visuals but I feel he need to be more clear and to the point what he want to communicate with his presentation.  This time it was a non stop barrage of quotes from different Complexity and Systems thinkers but where was Jurgens own thinking or opinions.

If he would not be so fuzzy, as on the picture above, this could have been a much better session.

Marcus Hammarberg: Theory of Constraints and Specification by example

My fellow Lean/Agile Coach at Avega Group Marcus Hammarberg held a great presentation on Specification By Example and how this could be a way of exploit the knowledge bottleneck in software development.

Keynote: James Sutton: The Living, Breathing Organization: Lean, Science and Complexity

This was a great keynote by James Sutton. He talked about Systems Thinking, the scientific method, Lean Thinking and Complexity Theory. He used life as a metaphor how all this was connected.

Here are some tweets about the keynote.

The Command & Control version of Lean is called Krap Kaizen

_{Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/jurgenappelo/statuses/131034245115297792}

If Lean is something being done to you… instead of something you are doing to the system… you may have Krap Kaizen on your hands #less2011

_{Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/cyetain/statuses/131044566882205696}

At the end of the presentation James said that some of the tools of Lean manufacturing was suitable in product/software development space. In the Q&A section he was asked what tools and he specifically mentioned Standard work. I think this was especially interesting as my lightning talk on the subject was shortly after his keynote.

What he referred to as Standard work was the detailed work instructions used in manufacturing and the common misconception that these are for controlling what to do when they are really the foundation to continues improvement. If you don’t know how work is done now how can you know that a process change is an improvement or not?

Håkan Forss: Standard work in software development

This was my lightning talk session. You can find the slides in my previous post 

Pim Witlox: Managing Agile Development

Showed us in less than six minuets what his research work on Managing Agile Development was about.

Day 2

I started the second day by facilitating the LESS 2011 Stockholm Lean Coffee event.

Keynote: Peter Middleton: Lean Software Management: BBC Worldwide Case Study

I really liked this keynote. Peter was very to the point and presented parts of the BBC World Case study. Nothing really new to me in forms of methods, tools or techniques but a good case study.

Peter Bunce: The Leader’s Dilemma

This session was not adding anything new that Bjarte Bogsnes had not talked about in the keynote. To bad as I thought the title and the abstract really felt interesting and I had high expectations.

Henrik Mårtensson: A hoop through the OODA loop – Basic principles of business strategy and organization

Best session in the conference for me. Henrik’s witty presentation style and well thought out slides was great. Most of the agile methods and tools heavily rest of fast feedback. The OODA loop is just about that – fast feedback loops so you can make decisions based on your current conditions fast.

Henrik talked about how the US Marin Corps decision making structure and “self-organizing” teams is so effective.

He also talked about how Hoshin Kanri organizational structure. Very interesting stuff. 

Claudio Perrone: A3 & Kaizen: Here’s how

Claudio had the best slides of the conference! Great content and a great presentation. Claudio talked about how to really do Kaizen and using A3 as an important part of the process improvements.

Paul Gooderham: What Really Motivates Employees?

This presentation was to academic for me, I think. The topic is really interesting but I didn’t feel like the question in the talk was answered.

Keynote Steve Denning: Making The Entire Organization Agile

Before the summer I contacted Steve Denning about speaking at LESS 2011 about Radical Management. Now after so many hurdles on the way I was delighted to hear him speak about the thinks he have written in his book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management

The presentation was great and had a high pace with lots of content. The main point of his talk was that is now time to change to a new management paradigm if companies want to survive. The old marketplace has changed and now the customer is the boss!

The next generation companies will have to focus on:

• New Goal: Delight the customer – this is the over arching concept
• New manager role: From controller to enabler
• Coordination of work: From bureaucracy to dynamic linking
• New values: Radical transparency
• Communication: From command to conversations

LESS is More

Thank you Steve for coming and I hope everyone enjoy his book The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management curtsey of Avega Group.

Day 3

Day 3 was Tutorials & Workshops day. I was asked by the conference organizers to arrange a game day where we would play two games: the MIT Beer Game and the getKanban Board Game.

You can read more about the LESS 2011 Game Day in my previous post

Conclusion

I really had a great time at this conference. The content was mostly good but what I really appreciated was the open and engaged community. I had such a great time talking to so many great people. Thank you all for coming and hope to see you soon again!

LESS is More!

MIT Beer Game

The game MIT Beer Game is a simulation game of system dynamics. It was introduced in the 60′s by MIT’s Sloan School of Management and further popularized by John Sterman and Peter Senge. The goal of the game is to optimize a supply chain in several stages to meet customer demand while minimizing logistics and warehousing costs.

This game session was led by Rolf Häsänen from EPL Business Institute and I was assisting.

We had two teams playing: KOFF and Karhu. Both teams played well with high spirit and lots of fun. Team Karhu won with a cost of approximately $1700 and team KOFF was around $3300

Here are some of my pictures

Links

System Dynamics Society
System Dynamics Conference, July 22 – July 26, 2012
Training and education
MIT System Dynamics in Education project
WPI distance learning on System Dynamics
Masters in System Dynamics
Supply chain
The MIT Beer Game
The Beergame in business-to-business eCommerce courses – a teaching report
Chain reaction – Managing a supply chain is becoming a bit like rocket science

Software simulations for System Dynamics
Vensim
Ithink

The getKanban Board Game

The getKanban Board Game is a physical board game designed to teach the concepts and mechanics of Kanban for software development in a class or workshop setting. It has been described as the most effective way to teach Kanban. It’s hands-on, engaging, and fun. The getKanban Board Game is frequently used in Kanban training classes around the world.

This game session was led by me.

We had one game running. It was a very engaged team that played with high energy and intense discussions. People were suppose to leave early but we stayed on for most of the afternoon. The sessions was so intense so I didn’t remember to take any pictures of the team playing but here is the result and the charts.

Closing notes

Thank you to all who attended and made this a great final day of LESS2011.

Thank you Rolf Häsänen for running the MIT Beer Game on your own time. Thank you Avega Group and Mattias Skarin and Crisp for the getKanban Board Games.

A cornerstone for continuous improvement in Lean is standard work. Standard work is a description of how a process should operate. Without standard work it is much harder to know if process changes are improvements or not. Implementing standard work in a manufacturing process with repetitive task sounds reasonable but how do you implement standard work in something as variable as software development where there is basically no repletion of tasks? In this Lightning Talk you will be shown an example of how standard work was used in a software technology migration project. The intended audience is managers, team leaders and coaches working with process improvements.

Using a kanban system for your software development system is a very effective way to balance your demand to flow. Limiting your Work-In-Process(WIP) will help you understand and learn your process capabilities. The lower the WIP, the faster you will find where in the process your need to make improvements.

Context

Do you have a reasonably stable process over time? Do you have a process that has two strongly separated steps following each other? The second step has more than one person working in it? It is very hard to eliminate the separate steps and create a process without hand-offs?

Then you may want to consider going from a single shared work stream to separate work streams in your process.

Shared work stream Better for shorter term productivity More difficult to understand causes of problems Takes longer to find process constrain

Separate work streams Easier to understand causes of problems Better for longer term productivity Shows process constraint faster

Shared work stream

A shared work stream is were you load balance between two or more people in the same step. Tester 1 can pull work from both Developer 1 and 2. Tester 2 can pull work from both Developer 1 and 2 as well.

The benefits are quite obvious, when Tester 1 or 2 are ready to pull work they can pull from whatever work is available. You can probably lower your WIP as you will share a common work queue and this will bring down your lead times. This is a flexible solution that will allow you to work around potential problems in the process and you will have higher productivity in the shorter term.

But.

Load balancing in this way will make it harder to detect your process problems as variation in your process will rise and the problems may get hidden in the load balancing in the shared work stream. 

Separate work streams

When using separate work streams you will not load balance between people. Tester 1 can only pull work from Developer 1. Tester 2 can only pull work from Developer 2.

It sound very inflexible. If the work doesn’t flow people will get idle. People don’t like to be idle. What can possibly be the benefits of this approach?

Using separate work streams will have a similar effect as WIP limits. When you lower WIP problems in your process will be visible faster. Separate streams will also show your process problems much faster. It will be much easier to see where the cause of a problem occurs. You will be able to understand faster what to improve in your process. As you improve over time the process will stabilize and the process will be more productive.

Using Classes of Service

But what will the people do when they get idle due to the variability in the process?

One option is to have your over capacity, people that’s idle, work on process improvement work or lower priority work. Use a set of different Classes of Service for your work. When people gets idle in their work streams have them work on the lower priority work and process improvements. When the standard work is yet available move back to the standard work as fast as possible. This will give people something to do as they wait for work.

Conclusion

If you have a long term goal to gradually improve your software process capability, understanding what works and what’s not, is essential. Using a pull system like a kanban system is a great start. Lowering your WIP is the first step and then creating separate work streams may be your next step if you want to maximize your understanding and learning.

Use different Classes of Service when people gets idle instead of load balancing.

Much of this is inspired by Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata and chapter 5 in particular.

General impression

Day two of the Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 (#lkce11) conference was very good as well(read about day 1 here). I had some very hard session selection decisions to make.

Day two also introduced a Kanban system for the lunch buffet. To prevent the lunch process to come to a complete stop, as it did on Monday for some (not me as I was early), a fixed number of Kanban tokens was handed out as people entered the lunch room and was collected as they left. This kept the process flowing. Great process improvements!

Sessions

Keynote

John Seddon

John Seddon was entertaining as usual. He talked about 95/5 rule described by W. Edwards Deming and the importance to change the system and not the people.

He also talked about the importance of eliminating hand offs and focusing on the total lead time and not on individual steps in a process.

Work specialization and standard work is not a good in systems with with high variability

Manager are obsessed with managing cost. When you manage cost you make them higher. Manage value!

We also got the usual John Seddon Lean tools bashing. And some on agile

Agile is doing the wrong thing faster

We don’t track utilization, we track availability as this is useful if you want to make a sale

Growing Pains and Remedies. Using Kanban to affect and embrace change from R&D to production

Chris Young, Dan Brown

I had the great fortune to dine with Chris Young at the Gala Dinner and we spoke quite a bit about the things he and Dan presented in this experience report. But I did really enjoy it anyway.

They talked about the challenges of how to synchronize the work between different teams from different companies and different countries. They also talk about how they improved as they focused more and more on quality instead of focusing on throughput.

If you want to improve throughput you should forget about throughput and focus on quality

If you are bored in the daily standup raise your hand. Lots of hands means you take the current discussion off line

Chris also told a interesting story where he had to visit the hospital and get some stiches. After 3 hours of waiting he got examined but was asked to come back the next day so he didn’t have to wait so long to get his stiches. The day after there was a suture clinic that would do sutures in batches in a very efficient way. But what about Chris total waiting time!?

Igniting change in 20 teams within 6 months. An experience Report from Sandvik IT Services

Johan Nordin, Christophe Achouiantz

This was the highlight of the day. I would say this session was close second to Kent Becks session on day 1. Sorry Michael Burrows I had to place you on third

Johan Nordin and Christophe Achouiantz talked about how they have introduces Lean ideas and Kanban to 26 teams at Sandvik. The session was very well crafted with great visuals and the presentation was well rehearsed and went very well.

They presented how the used A3 reports to build buy-in from management and how they used that buy-in to introduce 26 teams to Lean and Kanban through a one day Kanban kick start.

They tried not to push the ideas and concepts to the teams but shaped the path for the teams and then they let the teams pull help from them as the teams needed it.

Great session!

You find the slides here

4 Pecha Kuchas

Markus Andrezak
Arne Roock
Jim Benson
Yuval Yeret

The Pecha Kucha format was new to me so I just had to go and see how it was. Four talks with 20 slides that show for 20 seconds.

Markus Andrezak talked about democratizing Kanban

Arne Roock about 10 ways to improve your Card Wall

Jim Benson on what food he has eaten the last year or so!!??

Yuval Yeret about limiting the number of polices in process. Slides

Interesting format with mixed results.

Build it and they will come

David Joyce

David Joyce introduced us to some of the Lean Startup ideas by describing his experience from Jalipo.

At Jalipo they did all the right things if you would look at it from an Agile implementation perspective. They built a high quality product on record speed using all the right Agile tools. They only had one problem: There where no customers who wanted to pay for the product!

Maybe Seddon was right:

  Agile is doing the wrong thing faster

Interesting subject but the format was a little to slow for my taste.

Why Kanban fits the Jimdo company culture

Fridtjof Detzner, Sönke Rümpler

Interesting session. But for some reason I did not get engaged. They are using visualization and Kanban throughout the company and it really works for them.

Take a look at this great video

How Agile and Lean changed my Organization

Bernd Schiffer

Bernad taled about how IT-Agile use Lean ideas and Kanban in their business. This felt more a regular session than an experience report.

At IT-Agile they are using the ideas from Daniel Pinks book – Drive

They have 20% days

They have tried to eliminate all explicit rules and are using purpose and transparence so everyone can make their own decisions that are appropriate in their situation. High trust environment that creates motivation and a desire for mastery.

Keynote

Stephen Bungay

I unfortunately had to leave in the beginning of this keynote. Stephen was very entertaining and came across as a cross bread between the stereotype of a British officer from the second world war and Mr. Bean. I loved it!

For the short time I could listen he talked about the history of modern management and started to touch on how some military management has taken a different approach.

I’m sorry I couldn’t stay.

Summary

This was over all a very good conference. It get’s a 5 of 5 for Return On Invested Time from me. I only wish I could have been able to go to all the sessions! Good work!

Here are the conference is summary by Ceren Meissner!

^{Art work by meissner@kommunikationslotsen.de}

General impression

The first day at the Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 (#lkce11) conference was great (read about day 2 here)! A very nice venue and very well organized. Great program with great talks all day.

My hat off to everyone involved!

Today I wanted to attend as many experience reports as possible but I made some exceptions.

Sessions

Here are the sessions I attended today and some short snippets from the session. I was a bit distracted as I had my own talk in the afternoon

Development Process @ Prezi

Szilveszter Farkas, Kalman Kemenczy

This was an interesting talk about how Prezi moved from a small team of developers with no real process and how the moved through Scrum to Kanban. Some of the reasons for moving to Kanban:

• Having problems meeting Sprint goals
• Production problems was making it hard to plan and commit
• Estimation was not very effective

Don’t be a Kanban slave

Don’t be a slave to your current visualization and process.Prezi treat Deployed and Launched as two separate thinks. The use feature switches to turn features on and off.

We measure everything

Prezi use dashboards with real time data and diagrams are annotated with things like when something is released/Launched. Application framework has simple hooks that makes it very easy to add new measurements.Prezi use a/b testing to drive part of its planning.Over all a great presentation.

End to end Kanban – A practical report

Volker Graubaum

This talk was about how E-Net turned to Kanban to be able to run multiple projects in parallel and putting the focus on getting things done. They even included all their administration process of the projects on the Kanban board. Exit criteria for a project was invoice sent.

The initiative to move to Kanban was a top down decision but the implementation involved everyone in the company. Everyone got the Kanban training.

People had personal WIP limits: 3 for planed work and 1 joker for other work

They had recorded a time laps video that was great.

Kanban and the Importance of Equanimity – Navigating politics and data aversion at the BBC

Katherine Kirk

This was a very interesting talk but I was distracted with my up coming talk, sorry Katherine

The part I think I picked up was:

Start with what you got, collect and bring measurements to the forefront and feed it back for improvements

You can’t just use hard facts and data and think people will make the “right” decisions. You need to take into account how people will react to that data and what their agenda is. If you can create an environment where people will treat hard facts, data and the different agendas and treat this just as the situation is right now. Use peoples natural curiosity to examine and draw conclusion from the full landscape of information.

The talk was interesting but there was way to much text on the slides so from time to time you got overwhelmed and got lost.

Keynote

David Anderson

Nothing real new was presented that I haven’t heard from David before. But he where giving some more details in some cases. I was really looking forward to hear something new. Guess that was presented at Lean & Kanban 2011 Benelux

Predictability in software development requires good configuration management and deployment capability

Understand how work works. Collect process data before you make commitments

What can traffic in Stockholm tech you about queuing theory?

Håkan Forss

This was of cause my presentation and you can find the slides here

Not just Maintenance. Key points for using Kanban in large scale Product Development

Yuval Yeret

I was a little bit out of it as this was right after my talk but the talk did not have a main thread. The visuals in the presentation was adding more confusion than clarity. To bad as I thing Yuval is a great thought leader in the Kanban community.

The thing I really liked was the notion of Kanban being like a fractal. You can zoom in and out more or less as much you need.

You can find the presentation here

Level demand, balance workload and manage schedule risk with Classes of Service

Michael Burrows

This was the second best talk of the day, just behind Kent Becks closing keynote. This was a very talk about Classes of Service and how to use them to level demand and handling risks.

Mixing up different kind of work for a team will make them more comfortable

Limit WIP – Leave choice upstream. Creating business flexibility and capability to respond to market changes

To much project WIP? Use the “A3 / Alignment” approach. Write a A3 for every project

Great visuals and great content.

Keynote

Kent Beck

This was the highlight of the day. Very good presentation of the different forces that will affect the way you work and how you organize your process based on the release cadence.

Over time we will see hourly, daily and weekly deployment cycles be much more common

Gala dinner

The gala dinner was probably the best conference dinner I have ever had. Thank you Atlassian for the dinner and the free license. Also an inspiring talk about breaking your limits by extreme runner Norman Bücher