Learn how the Corporate Internet Solutions group at Nationwide Insurance found creative ways to manage the competing and vague priorities of corporate silos by incorporating ideation into the portfolio pipeline. As the connection point between otherwise disconnected corporate entities, the Product Owner team adapted the Scrum process to better manage 17 dependent projects, reluctant internal business partners, and suspicious methodologists, by articulating clear Pre-Discovery activities, RITE usability testing, scenario planning, and kanban in the quest for continuous flow.

In 2004, SEP tried adopting Agile practices. However, Agile failed to have the desired lasting impact across the entire organization. Things changed in 2007, when SEP implemented Kanban for the first time. We will explore how Kanban teams at SEP matured through the lens of the Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition. We will examine what this pattern has meant for institutionalization of Lean in the organization. We will discuss a counterintuitive technique for higher success and adoption rates of new methodologies. Finally, we will review common pitfalls teams encountered adopting Kanban.

Want to improve your team? Take a drama class! Want to measure how your agile adoption is going, take a business course!! This session explores the often overlooked practices in other industries for inspiration on improving agile practice in software development. From waste management and lean manufacturing to understanding motivational and sustainable development with NLP, I want to help people begin to look at things differently and perhaps find their own fixes from the rich variety of disciplines in everyday life that they can apply to agile software development.

Inkubook.com came into existence in March 2008 when an existing software development and marketing organization received a new CEO and was immediately tasked with building an entirely different product. This report discusses the evolution from the existing Scrum process through four major changes as the team’s process shifted to meet the team’s goals and management’s demands. Focus will be given to the barriers benefits that the team perceived with each stage. Where possible, a discussion of the unintended consequences of the team’s actions will be explored with specific examples.

This game is designed to teach/learn/experiment how to use Kanban. In this session, everyone will play it and learn the way how Kanban works, effective use, and how to teach their colleagues “Kanban.”

I have designed this game to teach new members the Kanban. Attendees form teams and will have a set of task cards. They will build a Kanban Board from the tasks and ‘commence’ on the project. Using dice, the project might finish by the time or not, as in reality. An important part of the game is how teams must face problems happening by accident.

Scheduling should be done independent of and orthogonal to workflow. In fact, you don’t have to create a schedule for a flow system. It will flow all by itself, and work will flow much faster and much more reliably than it could possibly follow a schedule. But take a closer look at that workflow: Just when you thought it was obsolete, the V model reappears. This talk will step through systems design, approval processes, and scheduling, development workflow, depolyment, from a completely different angle.

Have you ever been told to multitask–working on so many projects simultaneously you don’t know where to start or what to do next? Or, have you ever felt so pressured by your organization that you asked your staff to multitask?

Multitasking happens when leaders don’t set direction for themselves and other people. When leaders decide which projects people work on in what order—the project portfolio—they set the stage for success. But those decisions are not easy. We will see what a portfolio is, what it is and isn’t, and we’ll explore how to make collaborative decisions.

After revolutionizing the automobile industry, Lean principles have been applied to different knowledge areas, such as software development. However, many people haven’t been introduced to the concepts that made Lean successful. In this interactive session, the participants will work in a small Lego production line, experiencing the problems and applying Lean practices to overcome them. 8 to 20 participants, divided in 4 teams, will learn about: systems thinking, push vs. pull systems, waste, etc. We will also compare the production line scenario with the software development industry.

For almost a decade our community has claimed that agile is a risk-driven approach. Yet there is very little published material on agile risk management. Traditional risk management is based on avoidance of external variations. While, traditional project scheduling treats tasks homogeneously from a risk perspective. Lean pull systems and Real Options Theory provide new means to manage overall business risk in technology projects. This tutorial describes 3 techniques that evolved in the kanban community that increase sophistication of risk management and provide improved business agility.