BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Presentations How Would You Say That? Conversations for Double Loop Learning with Kanban

How Would You Say That? Conversations for Double Loop Learning with Kanban

Bookmarks
57:55

Summary

Benjamin Mitchell advices on carrying team conversations about information presented on Kanban boards helping members to change their thinking and acts in order to achieve evolutionary change.

Bio

Benjamin Mitchell works with leading software product development organizations to assist them to become more effective at achieving their business goals. He is a highly-rated international speaker on applying innovative approaches, such as Kanban, to software development. Based in London, he works with clients as a speaker, executive coach or team consultant.

About the conference

For the second time we are launching the GOTO Copenhagen conference in May 2012 after a successful execution in 2011. GOTO Aarhus has been an annual event in Denmark since 1996 and attracts more than 1200 participants (formerly known as JAOO). The target audience for GOTO conferences are software developers, IT architects and project managers.http://gotocon.com/

Recorded at:

Aug 08, 2012

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or or login to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Community comments

  • This is hard to watch and harder to make sense of

    by Frank Krasicki,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I have to say that I think this fellow has so conflated KanBan and Agile concepts that virtually nothing of the beginning of this video makes sense to my understanding of how something like these projects should be run.

    Based on my understanding of Kanban it is the practice of applying the theory of constraints to project or product management - this has nothing to do with Agile and everything to do with adoptive behavior. Nowhere does this fellow speak to the concept of "Done". His Kanban boards are treated like racetracks instead of swim lanes and his project and task priorities are cosmically co-incidental to meaningful work. He goes on to blame the "visualization" for all of this dysfunction.

    This is but the tip of an iceburg of jaw-dropping observations and assertions that do nothing but make Kanban look like agile on crack. He reinvents the Kanban board so as to make the entire intellectual backbone of the theory less than worthless.

    IMO, this video poorly represents the subject matter it claims to speak to. Wish this weren't so.

  • Re: This is hard to watch and harder to make sense of

    by o f,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Skip the (ab)use of Kanban. Concentrate on what he is saying; how to learn from other people.

  • Re: This is hard to watch and harder to make sense of

    by Huw Lloyd,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    It's an interesting mix. The skew in methods could actually be a good example of influence of the culture (an investment banking interpretation of Kanban in this case).

    Benjamin's fluency helps to bring these tricky subjects out: how culture influences the meaning of artifacts like visual diagrams and how small steps can be made to change this, through establishing trust and communication.

    In the video, from 45 minutes to 48. Benjamin highlights a contradiction he perceives, which is that by avoiding emotional resistance trust will be reduced, and that he believes this contradiction is built into the Kanban guidance.

    Much of the talk around this is how to improve the culture (work practices) through more considered communication.

    The wider contradiction seems to be between lean and the quality of the workplace: cultures that support the qualitative improvements we go through in our own personal development. I described a number of these contradictions in a recent published article on infoq (www.infoq.com/articles/contradictions-technical...).

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

BT