In The Importance of Mindsets, I described why your mindset, where you think from, is critical.  read more »

My alternative title to this blog was "If You Say Kanban Isn't About People, then You Don't Know What Kanban Is." But that sounded too much like a rant. However, I have to admit, much of this blog is a rant.

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I'm pretty excited about heading down to Los Angeles today to speak, network, and attend sessions at the Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference. This is just the start of three conferences for me in May. I'll be speaking at the LSSC11, the Scrum Gathering and the Seattle PMI event. The differences between the mindsets of these three communities is very clear to me.

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One of the things I like about Lean is that it offers a metaphor that everyone involved (even executives and customers) can understand. The metaphor is that the development system is like a pipeline. Ideas go in and value comes out. Yes, it's much more complex than this but this simple metaphor will suffice for the points I want to make. I illustrate this pipeline in Figure 1.

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I was at the LESS 2010 conference last week and heard Jurgen Appelo's talk Compexity Versus Lean. I thought this was very thought provoking. Unfortunately, almost every time he mentioned Lean, he was describing it in a way no Lean thought leaders I know would think about it.  read more »

It is seductive to think about scaling Agile up from teams to the enterprise. It seems the correct path to take because you can almost always find a team or two where Agile methods lead to great improvements over Waterfall methods. But what works for a few teams at the local level often obscures the bigger picture: creating enterprise agility. Enterprise agility is the ability for an organization to deliver value quickly when needed. Sadly, I have seen many organizations achieve many successes locally – team agility – and move even further away from enterprise agility.

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I saw an interesting blog today by Mike Dwyer called "Scrum is a Silver WHAT and you want to put it WHERE?" where he makes the pithy statement that "Scrum is not a silver bullet – it's a silver mirror." Now I definitely think this is a good blog and recommend you read it. However, I must admit to having had two simultaneous reactions to it – and realized it epitomized my concerns about how Scrum is promoted. My first reaction was – pretty cool.  read more »

I've had an interesting last 5 weeks – 3 conferences and a week of vacation! I keynoted at Agile Japan in Tokyo alongside Professor Nonaka (co-creator of the general Scrum product development method from which Jeff Sutherland created the Scrum Software Development process). I gave two talks at the Lean Software and Systems Consortium (LeanSSC) conference in Atlanta and I just sponsored and talked at the San Diego PMI. All with a vacation in between where I was able to reflect on the industry (those who know me know I never totally disengageJ ). These last few days I've been re-reading David Anderson's Kanban book – which I highly recommend to all software developers and managers.

The conferences represented very diverse audiences: those new to software agility, experts in software agility, and those unclear what Agile even is (and with many not even in software). Nevertheless, there was a common theme across all three: Respect for management, the recognition of the need to attend to the whole value stream, and a belief that people were good and if there were problems you needed to look at the systems in which they were working rather than accuse the teams of lacking discipline or motivation. It was refreshing! And, unfortunately, not something I typically notice to be widespread in many mainstream Agile conferences (particularly those centered around non-Lean Agile). Fortunately, this awareness is slowly growing in these more mainstream Agile conferences.

I point this out because I believe Agility is entering a new phase.

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 Notes from LeanSSC Atlanta 2010

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Well, it depends. J Depends on what you are trying to do. Are you trying to explain Lean or are you trying to get someone to be able to take advantage of its principles and apply them in their own work?  read more »