In this interactive workshop we will examine multiple examples of Antipatterns observed in real-world Kanban boards. In each case we will identify the issues and discuss ways to improve the situation. We will review a number of better alternatives and see how the improvements map to the core principles of Kanban such as visualization, managing flow, and making policies explicit. Brand new to Kanban? Learning by example is a great way to get started! A long-time Kanban veteran? Come to see how many antipatterns you recognize and help firm up our Kanban Antipattern taxonomy and nomenclature!

Kanban is an extremely versatile and effective Agile method that has seen significant growth in popularity over recent years. Kanban’s flexibility has led to widespread adoption to manage business processes in disparate contexts such as HR, loan processing, drug discovery, and insurance underwriting, in addition to Information Technology. Like snowflakes, no two Kanban boards are alike. The downside to this flexibility is there is no well-known and easily accessible library of patterns for designing effective Kanban boards. Like Apollo engineers, teams are expected to design their board starting from first principles. Unfortunately, sometimes teams get stuck with board designs that may not provide the visibility and insight into their workflow they hope to see. Worse, some designs actually may serve only to obscure the situation. Working within the limitations of an electronic board can exacerbate the problem even further. Is all hope lost? Certainly not!

Let’s learn more about effective Kanban system design by examining what to avoid and why. Learning by example is effective and fun!

Kubernetes married with a cloud provider elastic, highly available infrastructure. Many CI engines today (Jenkins, Bamboo, Gitlab, CircleCI), provide native integration with kubernetes so that your build and deploy workload can be elastically executed. This allows your pipeline to meet the needs of your schedule, be it the 4pm pile on to commit code before going home, the mad rush to get a hot fix to production, or the surge of an unexpected customer ask. Gone are the days of the build queue growing and you CI engine collapsing under the weight of a hundred build requests. In order for a pipeline to leverage this capacity changes must be made to the pipeline architecture. Tools must be dockerized, the ephemeral nature of running docker must be considered, kubernetes specifications or helm charts must be generated for the application, automated testing must be adapted to work in the new architecture, and then there is the database. Each one of these issues, plus many others I’ve missed contained unfortunate, unforeseen pitfalls that translated in schedule delays. Join Glenn as he helps you short circuit the pitfalls of migrating to kubernetes off of your static in-elastic virtual infrastructure.

Agile coaching is essential as keeper of the agile flame in an agile organization or transformation, but we can’t do it alone and have a lot to learn from Organizational Change Management. The traditional Organizational Change Management practice emphasizes the human aspect that should be primary focus if we want to influence the “culture” of an organization, beyond basic agile practices. In this session, we will look at the ADKAR model for change, and how to combine that with agile frameworks to make a lasting cultural foundation in your organization, to create true business agility beyond the IT department.

Getting to Business Agility requires expanding beyond agile practices strung together, it requires the entire organization working in concert to decrease time to market with a forward looking approach to their industry. We need to focus on organizational agility, as well as strategic agility. Ernst and Chrobot-Mason introduced these practices in their 2011 book “Boundary Spanning Leadership”. Join me in sharing my experience using Boundary Spanning Practices at a large financial institution to enable an enterprise agile transformation that sticks, while introducing the practices to you and giving you hands on practice. We will speed-date through each practice to give you an idea of how it works, with resources to dig deeper if this appeals to you.

1. Introduction

2. Explanation of benefits of building long-term Agile plan

3. Steps for building long term Agile Plan

4.Dialogue with the audience

5. FAQ