Workshop: Lean Thinking and Kanban for Agile Teams

Location:

Level: 
TBD
9:00am - 4:00pm

Date:

Thu, 16 Jun

Prerequisites

TBD

Software engineering has undergone dramatic changes in the past two decades - moving from rigid waterfall processes with massive documentation written by people that don’t understand how to make quality software, death marches, and disengaged teams, to agile development to more recent things like DevOps and continuous delivery. Throughout this transition, Lean Thinking has provided consistent principles for making decisions about how to build quality software-based solutions collaboratively, rapidly, and reliably and aligned to the needs of the customer and the purpose of the organization.

Lean thinking starts with customers, looks at how many organization delivers value to those customers, and visualizes that value stream to identify wasteful practices and handoffs and continuously inspect, improve, and adapt. This energetic, fast-paced workshop does exactly that - we look at the real value streams of people attending the workshop. We question whether the workflow is set up to build the right thing, build the thing right, and deliver value to customers as rapidly as possible.

We’ll introduce Kanban as a tool for managing the flow of work like user stories and features in a process which is being adopted by many Agile and Lean teams (and many other people responsible for creating value). Participants in the workshop will learn to map their current work using Kanban, how to use the policies like limiting work-in-progress to achieve different kinds of outcomes, as well as how to define the policies that constrain the collaborative process of software development. You’ll learn how to use those policies to manage risk and to reset negotiations around prioritization and recast them as collaborative problem solving.

Learning Objectives:

  • An introduction to Lean Thinking for Software Teams
  • Aligning Lean Principles to Agile Principles
  • Understanding Value and the customer
  • Value Stream Mapping
  • How to assess your value stream for inefficiencies
  • Defining releases, planning work, and measuring throughput
  • Why Continuous Delivery is essential and how to get there
  • Using Metrics for Continuous Improvement
  • Practices and metrics for focusing cross-functional teams on creating value
  • Managing priorities and dependencies across multiple teams

Speaker: William Evans

Chief Design Officer, Founder @LeanUXNYC, & Design Thinker in Residence @ NYU Stern

Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, DevOps, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at New York University's Stern Graduate School of Management. Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he brought LeanUX and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies. Before The Library Corporation, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in service design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network alanysis & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect working in Knowledge Management, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He holds an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Math, and master’s degrees in Human Computer Interaction and Cognitive Science. He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference now in it’s 6th year, founded the LEAD SUMMIT NYC, and was also the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.

Find William Evans at

Tracks

Monday, 13 June

Tuesday, 14 June

Wednesday, 15 June