Mike Cottmeyer's View Inside The Lean/Kanban Conference

Posted by Mike Bria on May 20, 2009

Sections

Process & Practices

Topics

Adopting Agile ,

Agile in the Enterprise ,

Agile

Tags

Conferences ,

Kanban ,

Lean

During the first week of May, the first organized conference focusing on Lean & Kanban was held in Miami. Mike Cottmeyer was present and used his popular blog Leading Agile to provide a relatively comprehensive play-by-play look into what occurred there.

The ideas of Lean have been brewing in the agile community for years now, and the more recent introduction of Kanban as a tool to apply Lean principles in software development organizations has brought real attention to the topic. It brings many questions to the table, particularly related to understanding what Lean and Kanban are all about and how they correspond to familiar concepts of Scrum and XP, as well as how Lean and Kanban contribute to our ability to advance Agile in our industry. What's special?

The Lean/Kanban Conference was structured to help shed light on these questions (and more) and Mike Cottmeyer has provided a great resource for the many people interested who did not attend. On his blog he kept track, nearly real-time, of all that occurred over the 2 day single-tracked conference, presented to the reader from Mike's P.O.V as he experiences it.

Mike's entries summarize as follows:

• (*link) Alan Shalloway's conference opening remarks, Dean Leffingwell's day-one opening keynote, and Peter Middleton's talk on improving "Requirements" with Lean
• (*link) James Sutton relating "Lean" & "Agile", and Sterling Mortensen's experiences with Lean at Hewlett Packard
• (*link) Mike's reflections after the first morning
• (*link) Amit Rathore on Lean in a Startup environment, and Corey Ladas's experience meshing Scrum and Kanban into Scrumban
• (*link) Jean Tabaka on how we learn to be Lean, some Lean ideas from Alina Hsu, and Alan Shalloway on the future of Lean
• (*link) David Anderson's day-two opening keynote, Karl Scotland on "Kanban, Flow, and Cadence", and Rob Hathaway's take on what it takes to be successful with Kanban
• (*link) Alisson Vale's advanced approach to Kanban, and Linda Cook's tale of Kanban at The Motley Fool, and Eric Landes success story using Kanban
• (*link) 2 unique presentations on their journey adopting Kanban by Eric Willeke then Chris Shinkle, and David Laribee's practical talk of Lean, Leadership, and need for Technology
• (*link) Alan Shalloway's closing Keynote

Possibly most interesting is an entry Mike posted a few days after the conference where he reflects on the experience and presents a good perspective on how Lean/Kanban fits into the "Agile world".

Other interesting experience reports and reflections available include those by John Heintz, Alan Shalloway, and Dean Leffingwell, among others. Further, many of the topics have launched some very good discussions in both the Lean and Kanban Yahoo! Groups, all worth taking some time to check out.

Also, stay tuned for InfoQ's video recordings of many of these sessions, to be posted soon.

 

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   Also, the usage of Twitter.

   by Kevin E. Schlabach

   Another great thing about this conference was the usage of Twitter. Mike started this, but many people joined in. I was miles away following the #lk2009 tag every half hour. It was insightful and valuable. It wasn't until the 3rd day that the non-attendee noise got in the way of following along.
   
   Note for future conferences (Agile2009?), create a tag for each stage and tweet away. Keep it real-time. It will help many others get value out of the conference and spread the value of these agile events. Maybe the Agile Alliance or InfoQ should pre-plan and structure this?

   Reply

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   Re: Also, the usage of Twitter.

   by Mike Bria

   Great addition, and idea!

   Reply

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