In our follow-up session to last year’s Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Observing Flow, we are excited to bring our newest installment of the series: Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Creating and Discussing Flow.

This session puts the attendee in the driver’s seat to create their own Kanban board configurations. We provide seven business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique constraints of each scenario. Each team/table in the room will spend a few minutes discussing how they would configure their board using the provided flip charts, markers, and stickies. A debrief with the entire room follows as each team shares its concepts. The instructors will also share their own board configurations and ideas.

These exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems, give you practice interpreting and creating board configurations, present multiple implementable ideas for any given scenario, and provide you with approaches for meaningful engagement. They are great for aspiring coaches, managers, and leaders who want to have more valuable conversations with their teams and improve Kanban implementations.

Agile at the team level fosters self-organization by leveraging constraints. Timeboxes, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and clear operational definitions are excellent examples of the kinds of constraints teams regularly employ to deliver reliably. Are you familiar and comfortable with these ideas, but uncertain how to apply them at larger scales? Are you looking for techniques that will allow you to harness the creativity of your teams to enable self-organization at scale? If so, this session is for you.

I’m passionate about applying concepts from Complex Systems Theory (as developed by Dave Snowden, Alicia Juarrero, Bob Artigiani, etc.) to the work of software teams. My colleagues and I at Excella have been exploiting these ideas by using a variety of patterns borrowed from different theories and frameworks to allow our teams to grow like healthy plants in a garden. From Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) we leverage the concepts of a single product backlog and a shared cadence. Kanban principles of visualizing the work and limiting WIP help align the teams and foster greater collaboration. Dave Snowden’s emphasis on Homo Narrans—the human as storyteller—has provided a framework for clarifying and promulgating common values, which are essential for decentralized decision-making. Collectively, these mental models created an environment that helped us scale one of our engagements from three teams to eight over the course of a single year.

Customers weren’t satisfied! The process took too long! The end product didn’t perform to specifications! Does this sound familiar?

A century ago, the U.S. Navy’s ship design process had serious problems, ones we would recognize and understand today. Come learn how these problems were solved in a large, real-world, organization through minor changes in structure and process. These changes illustrate the importance of:

• Gathering early feedback
• Rapidly iterating to expose unknowns
• Using multi-disciplinary problem-solving
• Employing Agile techniques outside of IT

Are you excited by the idea of Business Agility, but unsure how to create it? Learn new techniques by looking back. In the early 20th century, the U.S. Navy successfully leveraged Agile approaches to harness new technologies, encourage organizational learning, and develop a sustained pace of innovation, all key aspects of Business Agility. Find out how!

I’ll describe what the Navy achieved, explain why it worked, and illustrate how similar approaches can be used today to create greater Agility in our businesses and organizations. Some specifics include:

• Fostering innovation by the use of regular feedback.
• Employing safe-to-fail experimentation.
• Promoting evolvability through loose coupling and bounded autonomy.
• Balancing exploration and exploitation to identify and harness new ideas.

Organizational agility requires more than “scaling.” It requires deliberately finding the balance between exploring new, innovative ideas and exploiting proven ones. Agile software techniques can enable individual teams to find this balance, but few established patterns exist for harnessing it at an organizational level.

One successful model is the Trimble Software Framework (TSF), introduced by Trimble Navigation in the early 2010s. Borrowing from Agile, Lean, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and other proven methods, the TSF provided effective feedback to Trimble’s diverse collection of software teams on the effectiveness of their approaches. Where the TSF differed from other models was in its respect for variability.

The other authors of the TSF and I recognized that by promoting continuous improvement without dictating the path it should take, software teams would be free to experiment with new methods and explore new patterns. This increased overall organizational agility as teams tailored known good practices to their specific contexts and developed new ones. The TSF became a feedback loop that enabled software teams throughout the organization to learn from one another and constantly improve. Come hear how this was done, what we learned along the way, and how we used variability to permit a more effective balance of exploration and exploitation.

Tired of Agile As A Lip-service?

Feel like Lean is getting lost?

Being asked to improve everything without changing anything?

Do you want to know what you can do about it?

If so, this talk is for you! Join Trent and Matt as they use Institutional Theory to examine the current state of Agile adoption, what it means for our work today, and what it suggests for the future.

They’ll explain the increasing emphasis on frameworks, the move away from lightweight methods, and the paradoxes we’ve all observed in Agile adoptions. These developments follow clear and established patterns; they’re not unexpected. Come explore why we are where we are, and what we can do to move beyond Agile Despondency.

Imagine you were hired to provide consulting assistance for a new team just starting out with Kanban. The team has been struggling with their implementation and is looking forward to your expert guidance, support, and advice. It’s your first day and you just walked into the team room to look at their board. You want to make smart observations and thoughtful interpretations so you can have meaningful conversations with the team members. The team starts assembling in the team room for the daily standup and you plan on making some comments afterwards.

What comments would you make? What thoughtful questions would you ask?

This interactive presentation provides a detailed look at how to interpret and thoughtfully observe Kanban Boards to better understand the work of your teams. We will start with an overview of the Lean Kanban Method and then proceed through a series of interactive exercises that give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban boards. The exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems and provide opportunities to practice interpreting various board setups so you can have thoughtful and meaningful conversations with your teams.

Excited about the Cynefin Framework, but uncertain how to use it? This workshop will take you through a “four corners” exercise, using well-known movie scenes and historical events to place the Cynefin domains in context for you.

Customers weren’t satisfied! The process took too long! And the end product was bug-ridden and didn’t perform to specifications. Does this sound familiar?

The US Navy’s ship design process had all the common problems we see in product development today. Come learn how these problems were solved in a real-world, large batch system over 100 years ago through minor changes in organizational structure and process design.

Static designs and monolithic structures are brittle and prone to failure. How can we progress beyond them? By understanding the nature of our challenges and applying the right tools at the right time. This talk will describe how to use evolutionary principles to foster changes in your architecture and infrastructure so that you can create antifragile systems.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spoke to these ideas in “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Join us as we describe how we can:

• Move beyond planning for known failure modes and instead develop antifragile systems that are safe-to-fail in unanticipated ways.
• Leverage the Cynefin framework and its 5 sense-making domains to better frame problems and drive action.
• Employ microservice architectures to make the variability of our environments work for us, not against us.
• Gain knowledge more rapidly through multiple parallel experiments.