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Them’s Fighting Word!
I should start this post with some qualifications. I’m an consultant for a company called Imaginet. We’re a full service IT consultancy. Imaginet is a LeanKanban University (LKU) Founding Member organization. I am Imaginet’s Accredited Kanban Training Program Advisory Board representative and I also sit on the LKU Management Board. I’m an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) and a Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) with LKU. That said, I’m going to try and be as unbiased in my responses as possible, but please bear with me if I rant a bit. 😀
This week seems to have been a particularly interesting week in the volume of rhetoric and misinformation that is being spread about The Kanban Method. I’m not even sure where to start, but I’m compelled to say SOMETHING!
What is Kanban
I saw a tweet from Alan Shalloway (@alshalloway) talking about a great blog post from Joseph Hurtado (@josephhurtado) discussing What is Kanban? In this article, Joseph describes the current state of confusion in the industry around the word kanban and tries to start a movement to provide some clarity.
I’m the first to agree that there is a lot of confusion around the word kanban. In all of my webinars and presentations, I take a moment to provide some clarity on this issue. I think it’s very important that we all do this.
Joseph goes on to add some definitions, which is great.
This is where I start to take exception to his blog post because he then goes on to start actually misinforming his readers. He states:
The problem is that David Anderson, LKU and some other Kanban Consultants have decided that there can be only one valid Kanban method for business or even IT, theirs. In their view if you do not follow exactly The Kanban Method, dare to call Kanban Agile or add any Lean or Agile practices to it you are wrong.
This is so blatantly wrong that I hope it is unbelievable to his readers, but I feel compelled to respond because Imaginet and I belong in the group “LKU and some other Kanban Consultants”.
Our understanding of The Kanban Method (as per wikipedia) is:
The Kanban method as formulated by David J. Anderson[1] [2] is an approach to incremental, evolutionary process and systems change for organizations.
I’ve heard David (@djaa_dja) speak many times defending this definition of The Kanban Method because as far as I know, he is the originator of the name and the definition attributed to it. That seems reasonable to me. And in those conversations and in David’s classes, I have often heard him embrace specific improvement tactics from other industry-specific methodologies like Scrum or XP. Many of the LKU Kanban practitioners that I have personally spoken with embrace many of these same improvement tactics. David even goes ones step farther than many “Agile” evangelists and embraces improvement tactics from traditional project management methodologies like PMI when they make sense in a context.
What I think Joseph (and others) are doing is trying to define the meaning of the word kanban in a manner that suits them and at the same time belittle David, LKU and it’s members, for trying to protect the definition of “The Kanban Method” which we also sometimes just shorten to Kanban. Joseph and Alan also seems disturbed that we often shorten The Kanban Method to simply Kanban.
There was a time when I thought somewhat like Joseph but in a Scrum context. I often thought that people, who said “You are not doing Scrum” when a team was doing some of the tactics that the Scrum Guide but not all of them, where wrong and mean. Of course we were doing Scrum, just not all of it. I then had a conversation with Ken Schwaber and he put it very simply and it made sense and my thinking change. Ken used the game of Chess as an analogy and said to me (paraphrased) “If you use the rules of chess, you can say you are playing chess. But if you change the rules, are you still playing chess? No. The same goes with Scrum. If you follow the rules provided in the Scrum Guide, you are doing Scrum. If you deviate from the rules, you aren’t doing Scrum.” It seems to me that this is the same issue that Joseph is having an issue with, except we’re going one step further and using an abstract word (in this case) like kanban.
Joseph then goes on to create a new ‘thing’ which is great. Open Kanban. Sounds good until he describes it. And it starts to re-describe things that The Kanban Method has described. It describes some things that LKU Kanban practitioners have described. Which is honestly really flattering. As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The problem though is that now there is a competition. The Kanban Method vs. Open Kanban. And we’re back to rhetoric and bickering because honestly, we are all here to make money and grow our businesses.
To wrap up this portion, here are a bunch of thoughts that I hope counter some of the misinformation in Joseph’s article.
- The Kanban Method has a definition. I don’t think we should really argue about that.
- The Kanban Method has a singular purpose. Catalyze (encourage?) incremental and evolutionary process changes for organizations.
- David freely gives credit to all of the people who have influenced his journey and his continuing growth in this space.
- David strives to stimulate continuous improvement of The Kanban Method, especially by reaching out to the community of practitioners.
- Whatever your process is or the process that emerges to help your organization create value, that is NOT The Kanban Method, but simply what The Kanban Method helped you create.
- You’re process will likely evolve towards being flavoured by Agile or Lean thinking. They are both #reallygoodthings
- The Kanban Method is not Scrum. It does not compete with Scrum.
- The virtual kanban system that may be used to help your organization evolve WILL compete with Scrum. The Kanban Method does suggest the use of virtual kanban systems to better manage work. This doesn’t have to be viewed as a bad thing unless you are a Scrum evangelist who isn’t interested in new ideas. Scrum and Kanban both have noble goals.
- Scrum has a virtual kanban system at the heart of its work management system. It just uses larger batches than most kanban practitioners like and couples cadences unnecessarily.
- The virtual kanban system that may be used to help improve your organization will probably use some sort of kanban (visual signals, signboards)
- The Kanban Method does not advocate the exclusion of any kind of improvement tactic for the process or the organization. It just doesn’t necessarily provide specific guidance, which is fine. You are MORE than welcome to pull in unit testing, team formation, automated builds, continuous integration, iterations, tooling improvments, etc. if the specific tactic is anticipated to improve the system.
- The Kanban Method, as a methodology, won’t give you advice on a specific improvement tactic. It does not understand the context and it would be deemed “tampering” (and perhaps arrogant) to suggest improvements without information.
- The Kanban Method does provide guidance on several high-level improvements tactics that will help you create an environment for your organization to improve.
- These high-level tactics usually lack specific implementation details. Let’s call them meta-tactics that will allow for the creation of context-specific tactics.
- Don’t let myths and misconceptions cloud your assessment and the opportunity to learn about The Kanban Method, or any of these other methodologies. Please go out, learn and make your own decisions.
I’d love to talk to you about this. I’ll be at Agile 2013 in Nashville next week. If you’re going to be there and you’d like to discuss any of this, I’d love to catch up with you. Please message/mention me at @agileramblings on twitter and we’ll figure out a way to get together over a pint or two.
ALM Adoption Success Story – Success Factor 3 – Co-location
I don’t think I can fully communicate the value of co-location.
Any time I have been asked to help a company in recent years, the engagements have started out with an assessment. I don’t believe that I can provide sound advice unless I understand what the problems are and what the organization’s capabilities are.
One problem that EVERYONE has had so far is the absence of an effective place for their teams to work. Software development is a highly creative endeavor that requires (usually) a significant amount of collaboration between teammates and it constantly surprises me how organizations build terrible places for teams to try and achieve this!
When we started out with the client whom all of these Success Factor posts are about, the development team was spread out across ½ of a floor in an office tower and there were 2 members in a different city. Check out my hand-scribbled floor map with the initial, planned layout of the team members.
This is actually not bad compared to many companies I have observed, but this is far from optimal. The deficiencies that aren’t obvious from this floor map include:
- No team-specific collaboration space. Had to book meeting rooms and hope one was available.
- The Devs and PM have no whiteboard space. They are in cubicles.
- The BA, TW (Technical Writer) and CSM (ScrumMaster) were packed into a large office with minimal whiteboard space.
- PO (Product Owner) and HW (Hardware guy) were alone in their offices.
- There was no place to have daily stand-up meetings or to have our card wall up where everyone could see it.
- The sponsor was on the opposite side of the building.
For a team that is intending to collaborate frequently and intensely, this is a very poor setup. Our sponsor was spending in excess of $100k/month on the team in that room and he wanted to make sure we had every advantage to maximize that cost. So before we even kicked off the project, we made a rather bold request to have a board room near the sponsor converted into a team room. And our request was granted!! The facilities people were a little scared that we’d damage the boardroom table that was in there, so they had that taken out quickly, but the resulting floor plan looked like this:
Now we were excited! We had a room that could hold everyone. There was room for everyone but the PM and HW guy, due to the nature of their roles, didn’t need to participate as intensely as the rest of us, so they maintained their offices. And since our PO was also maintaining some business workload, she maintained her office as well. But all three team members attended all the meetings that we had in the team room and would often drop in to see how things were going. Let’s take a look at the team room.
I have to say, this is the best team room I’ve ever had the pleasure of working in. We had wall-to-wall whiteboards on the West and South walls, and the North and East walls where covered with large PostIt notes. The SE corner of the room had a projector screen and the projector sat on the SE corner of the team table. The computer on the East wall ran Skype and TeamPulse, the Agile Project Management Tool that we used on a daily basis (from Telerik). The room had a Skype account that was always logged in and you could call up that account and it would always auto-answer with video and put the caller on the projector. There were two microphones in the middle of the big table that would allow everyone to talk from where they were sitting with whomever called in.
I can’t say enough about the sheer wall space in this room. It was fantastic. On the wall-to-wall whiteboards, we had everything from architectural diagrams, to class diagrams, server layouts to retrospective results. We had everything on those whiteboards and they would be able to stay up for as long as needed for the team. We would write our retrospective notes up there, and leave them for the entire next sprint. Then the that sprint’s retrospective notes we be put up, and compared, and discussed. Then the former sprint’s notes would be erased. We had a constant rolling reminder of how important continuous improvement was to us.
The PostIt notes were used to keep less volatile things like our value statements right up in front of us. Also, team policies like our Definitions of Done, or our Prioritization logic where up there for everyone to see. There was never any doubt about how we wanted to work when you were in the team room.
We were creating a mobile system that included on-board tablets in trucks and we had our QA station right there behind our QA professional team mate, our PO and our BA! They could check specs, and then turn around and try it out right there in the QA environment. And if there was ever a problem, the developers could (and usually would) hear about it right away. That was one great aspect of our room that allowed our quality process become pervasive of everything that we did in that room.
I can tell you about a time that our QA lead was working on a test script in Microsoft Test Manager. Then he turned and tried the test step on the tablet and discovered a bug for a feature that was in the iteration. He called the developer over, who saw the defect right away. The QA lead logged the bug and the developer, whom had luckily just finished up a task, was able to pick up the bug and fix it right away. Our QA process was such that we could fix a bug, submit the code, all the automated quality checking mechanisms would run and then we could push the passed build up to the QA tablet where the bug had been fixed. In this particular case, the whole process took less than 1 hr. Discovered, Logged, Fixed, Built, Deployed, Re-tested, Passed. It is very rare for me to see a team perform this well.
But I totally believe that a big contributor is the team room that we’ve built for this team. Every team member feels the others pain when something doesn’t go right. This causes us to behave differently. Less selfishly and with a much more holistic approach to building the software solution.
And that was a known feature. The benefits of having the Product Owner, Business Analyst and Sponsor all within 20 feet of the developers is unbelievable. When anyone has a question about a feature or an idea that we’re trying to make real, the entire stack of business-focused people are right there, immediately available to answer the question. The only time that this team ever builds the wrong thing is when we are building something for someone who isn’t in the room. And you can bet that we escalate that immediately to our sponsor. Because he is 15 feet away. 
And he just drops in all the time!! If he has a problem, he tells us. If he is curious how we are doing, it pokes his head in. He will see us working on a problem with our process and lend a hand if he can. And you can bet that this closeness has made the team much more aware of his concerns and challenges. It never feels like Big Brother is watching because there is so much transparency on the team that it is always about trust and helping to get the job done.
I could probably go on and on about all the benefits of this team room but I’ll wrap it up for the moment and leave the rest to your imagination so that you can think about what the benefits of this team room would do for your team.
A Rant about Estimation – When Will We Stop Being Crazy
Warning: This is a bit of a rant. If at any point in this post, I seem like the crazy one, please tell me somehow. Comments, Twitter, LinkedIn. It would be really valuable to hear your thoughts. But I also encourage you to think about the situation, context and information I provided and decide for yourself whether the way we are acting is crazy. There are craziness checkpoints along the way! And if you think any of this is crazy as well, try to do something about it!
I had a work colleague recently ask a question on our internal mailing list. A summary of the question would be:
A company that is using ‘agile’ wants to know if their formula for converting story points into hours is sound because executives are doing short term (< 6 months) planning.
This is an example of how they break down their work. Seems reasonable and just like many other companies.
They also provided a formula. This is where the craziness starts which is startlingly common in our industry.
… and a sample of how the formula works.
Ok. At this point, all that is going through my head is “OMG”. Now comes the process by which they populate the formula.
- PMs provide the Epic Point estimate
- Developers decompose epics and provide point estimates for the user stories.
- Teams points (epic points or user story points?) per resource per sprint are tracked.
This is COMMON in my experience working with many organizations in our industry.
In all fairness to my colleague, he knows this is crazy. The developers in this organization know this is crazy. This is a typical scenario when executives and senior managers are trying to get information but using techniques that we have proven don’t work in our industry.
The good thing is, the way that they decompose work is fine and the formula will work as long as we don’t have have 0 velocity or 0 team members. 
The existence of the formula and the process by which we find numbers to put into it are where the craziness begins. First, a bit of information on “story points”.
Dave’s Craziness Meter
Story points are an abstraction agile teams use to REDUCE the perception of accuracy. 1 story point will require “some small” bit of effort to complete. 2 story points should require about twice as much effort as 1 story point. So that would be 2 times “some small bit of effort”. 5 story points require about 5 times “some small bit of effort”. I hope I’m clear about how we are purposefully reducing the perception of accuracy. Why? Because it incredibly difficult (usually impossible) and time consuming to create accurate estimates for the effort required to do knowledge work using the time units desired by decision makers!
I don’t even advocate using story points to my teams anymore. As numbers, it is too easy for people to plug them into a formula to convert them into something they are not intended to be converted into. I now generally only advocate sorting work by sizes like Small, Medium and Large.
Now let’s discuss the numbers that go into the formula from the example.
To start, a PM will make an point estimate in story points. In the example, it is 200 story points. I don’t know why a PM is doing an estimate on technical work.
Point estimates are bad. They imply accuracy where it normally does not exist. We have a point estimate of an abstraction that is trying to reduce the perception of accuracy. At least it is a single point estimate using an abstraction, so it could be OK except humans are optimistic estimators. Our interpretation of an estimate usually means that we expect the epic to fall in the middle of a normal distribution of epics and we have a 50/50 chance of falling under either side of the curve.
The problem with this is that the magnitude and likelihood of doing better than our estimate is the same as the likelihood and magnitude of doing worse than our estimate. And the other problem with this approach is it’s wrong. Using information from industry observations, we see that plotting the actual effort of our epics will form a log-normal distribution .
On a log normal distribution, the chance of doing better than our estimate is smaller than the chance of doing worse than our estimate. This means our epics usually fall behind the mode which means that they took more effort to complete than we expected. Simply put, when humans provide point estimates, we are usually wrong.
Let me state that again. When we estimate in knowledge work, we are usually wrong! And the formula above actually understands that!! The historical team buffer is a built-in admission that we need to add 20% to our estimates to make the numbers get closer to the actual values we observe!!! And I’ll bet that most epic actual values exceed the padded estimate!
Dave’s Craziness Meter
Ok, so point estimates are bad. And humans are bad estimators. That all came from the first point of the PM creating an epic point estimate. The rest should go more quickly. We’ve covered a lot of ground in that first exploration of the situation.
Next we have the developers decomposing the epics into stories and providing point estimates on those stories. All of the problems that we encountered in estimating above apply at this level as well.
The problem now is that it doesn’t work to simply sum up the points for the stories to get the points for the epic. If we look at the problems with point estimates, imagine doing that 20-100 times and adding the value together. We know that our our estimates are wrong (by at least 20% and probably more) and the impact of how wrong you are has a significant impact on effort. The only way to potentially add up the stories to see how much the epic will be is to estimate stories with an expected value that is the mean on a log-normal distribution and run a Monte Carlo simulation using all the stories in the epic. (That is an whole other blog post!)
I’m betting that a Monte Carlo simulation isn’t being used to turn the developer’s stories estimates into a meaningful epic estimate. Never mind the observed expansion (dark matter as David Anderson refers to it) of requirements that we see as we build the software and discover what we’ve missed. It’s always there, we just needed to build the system so that we could find it.
So our estimate is probably wrong. Significantly wrong. Period. Let’s move forward.
The next part of the formula is:
and the data in our example looks like this:
10 points is the average points per resource (I hate that word) per sprint. I’m assuming that they have standardized sprints for all teams in the organization. 2 is the number of team members (much better description) that will be working on this epic.
Do all developers produce 10 points per sprint, regardless of the task? Regardless of the skill level? Are we talking senior or junior developers? Is the business problem something they’ve done before, or something novel? Technology is know or new? Stat holidays? What if a developer is sick?
That 10pts could also be interpreted as developer velocity, and as we know, velocity can be highly variable for a team and is even more variable for individuals. In Scrum, we always talk about team velocity because it hides the variability of individual velocities that we know exists by averaging out the effort expenditure across multiple people over time. And we also know that velocity cannot be compared between teams! One team might have a velocity of 10 while another may have a velocity of 20, but the former team is more effective. The velocity number itself should not be interpreted as a standardized representation of effort that can be applied to any large scale planning activity (multiple project, multiple teams). It only works when you know the project and you know the team and it’s capabilities and past delivery history in specific contexts.
Dave’s Craziness Meter
So we have an epic estimate (crazy) divided by a developer velocity # multiplied by the number of team members (crazy). The next step is to multiply by the Historical Team Buffer otherwise known as padding the whole estimate.
The number from the formula is 1.2 in order to make the whole estimate 20% larger or 120% of the original estimate.
As I mentioned above, this buffer is a built-in indication that our estimates are wrong! We know we can’t deliver the epics as expected given our estimations, so we pad the estimate to make it closer to what we actually expect to do.
Dave’s Craziness Meter
So after all of that, we’ve arrived at a value of 12 sprints required to deliver this epic.
Phew!! Now we need to turn this into an expectation of effort expenditure or schedule.
Oddly enough, based on the question from our internal mailing list, we were not able to determine what the executives wanted. They either want to know how long it will take or how much it will cost. Unfortunately, I’d guess that they expect to get both from that number. They expect that the project will be done in 960 hours of developer effort which will occur in 12 weeks of calendar time.
That is 12 sprints and 80 hours of effort per sprint. That seems to be 2 developers for 40 hours per week or 80 hours per week.
So, I can with a fair bit of confidence tell you that the work week is 40 hours, 2 man weeks is 80 hours, and if a sprint is 1 week long with 2 people, the project will spend 960 hours of effort in 12 weeks.
What I can’t tell you is if both developers will work 40 effective hours per week. You almost certainly will pay them 40 hours per week, but whether all of that effort is applied to the story is another question. Emails, meetings, slow days, coffee cooler conversations, code reviews, design sessions, non-project related tasks are just some of the kinds of things that eat into that 40 hour work week. Never mind sickness or other work absences. Most people I speak with use 6 hours as a number for planning how much time a developer can effectively spend on a story. I’ve seen organizations where a team member regularly, for a variety of necessary reasons, spends less than 2 hours per day on a project they are supposed to be full time on.
So that does two things to our calculation. We’ve determined that the story is now about 960 hours in effort. If the developer can’t work on it 80 hours per week, the number of iterations has to go up! If the developers are only effective 4 hours per day, that means we have to spend 24 iterations on the project to get it done. Or potentially, the developers can deliver it in 12 weeks, but have to work 40 hours of overtime per week, which means the costs go WAY up for the project as the organization has to pay overtime. Let’s not even try to incorporate the diminishing returns on overtime hours, especially in an environment where that overburdening is chronic.
So as an executive, I wanted a fairly certain number for how much effort a specific epic is going to take so that I can do appropriate planning for the next 6 months. And 960 hours and 12 weeks calendar time is something I’m going to hang my hat on. I mean, 960 is a pretty precise number, and the “confidence” that the process has given the organization in that number must be pretty good.
Dave’s Craziness Meter
And since we’re doing organizational planning and planning multiple epics for multiple teams in the six month period, I’m also making the assumption that all epics that are 200 points are the same. And I’m assuming that all story points are the same effort. I’d have to deduce that that any epic of 100 points would take exactly half as much effort or half as much time as any 200 point epic. Any 200 point epic is exactly the same as any other 200 point epic. There is a lot of confidence in our formula and approach.
Dave’s Craziness Meter
Ok. I’ve maxed out my craziness at this whole endeavor. My hope is that you think this is all a little crazy as well because if we start to accept that we’re acting a little crazy we can start to do something about it.
Final Thoughts
I’d like to clarify that this post is not intended to be critical of people who are using Agile estimation techniques and trying to fit inside of an organizational traditional project planning methodology. We are all trying to do the best that we can. But sometimes we get stuck in a way of thinking. I’m hoping that this blog post might just jolt some of you into thinking about these problems and deciding to try and do something about them.
The formula used is as an example in this post is just that. A formula. And a very common kind of formula as well. The values you input into the formula will work as long as you don’t have 0 velocity or 0 team members. (No one likes division by 0.) In Kanban we use a lot of formulas and a scientific approach to understanding our work and workflows.
It’s the drivers underlying how we want to use formulas that we really need to be critical of. The formulas and the data that we feed into them has to make sense and drive us towards creating valuable data points on which meaningful decisions can be made. If we use complicated formulas and suspect or fictitious data as parameters, that makes the output worse than garbage because it provides some sort of sense of accuracy and a false sense of confidence because we think “this must be right. Our formula is sound.”
As long as we, as an industry, support this behavior, we’re are contributing to the continuation of this problem.
There are solutions to this problem, but exploring those options will be explored in another blog post.
But in the mean time, I’d love to hear your feedback! Do you think I’m crazy or do you think our industry is crazy?
Intro to Kanban at the Calgary .NET User Group’s Lunch Series
I recently had the privilege to speak that the Calgary .NET User Group’s new lunchtime series. This series is an opportunity for people to come and hear about exciting new topics with a minimal time commitment. And in this case, CNUG President Dave Paquette felt is was about time that we have a talk about Kanban.
Here is a link to the video of my 50+ minute presentation. It’s the first time they’ve video taped one of these, so please don’t be to critical of the quality. 😀
You can find the slides on Slideshare here.
The one thing I’d like to pull out specifically from this presentation was the exercise we went through (11:24 in the video) in understanding what it was we were actually talking about. In my slide deck, I indicated there are three common definitions of kanban out there and that we really needed to understand which one we were talking about in any conversation around the topic. And in an informal little survey of what participants though kanban was, we got the all three definitions from different people in the audience. The three commonly confused definitions are:
- kanban – signboard, visual signal, card
- kanban system – pull-based work(flow) management system, normally at the heart of a kanban method implementation
- Kanban method – An approach to incremental, evolutionary process change for organizations
Very often when I am discussing the Kanban Method with people who are new to any of these ideas, they are often getting them confused and it is really important that we clarify which we are talking about.
Do you know what Kanban you’re talking about? 😀
Thought-leaders – “Centers of Gravity” for Knowledge and Learning
I’m a consultant. I’ve been very fortunate to fall into this line of work and I really love what I do.
One of the hard parts of being a consultant though is “staying ahead of the curve”. A consultant is only as good as the skills he possesses and our industry is constantly (and successfully) striving to make our current knowledge and skillset obsolete.
So I do the things that most consultants do. I practice what I know and try new things. I read books. I surf the web. I have my favorite blogs. I use twitter lists to follow people who are aligned with particular interests of mine. And this has been a good tactic for keeping up.
At some point though, I started going to conferences and this is when my growth as a practitioner in my profession started to go to the next level.
I remember the first time I saw a industry luminary, Don Box. At the time, he was really ramping up SOAP, XML, Messaging, all that goodness of the early 2000s. The content of his talk was all available on the web or in books but that wasn’t what I really got from his presentation. In hindsight I’ve realized the true value I took from that experience was his passion for the topics and his stories! I came back from that conference pumped about those technologies and finding exciting new ways to use them! And boy is XML, SOAP and messaging exciting!! <smirk>
Fast forward a bit and now I’m a consultant who is trying to be better at helping individuals, teams and organizations be better and I’m doing this at an amazing time in our industry. Agile is going full steam ahead. Lean and Kanban are entering the process space and starting to make significant inroads. There is a lot to learn and discover, validate or refute. And this is where the thought-leaders come in.
This might sounds obvious, but thought-leaders are really interested in the things they are leading in! They are deeply interested in why “it” works or how they can apply “it” to a new problem. They want to break or validate their thoughts or have them refuted because they are passionate about making “it” better. It’s been my observation that they aren’t normally as interested in applying their specific knowledge to someone else’s problem like most of the rest of us.
It is this unique environment that thought-leaders create around themselves that presents an amazing learning opportunity to the rest of us.
Let me use an example that is fresh in my mind. I’m really interested in The Kanban Method. I think it has the potential to change the way that we all work. But there is a lot to learn and I also want to make sure I’m challenging the method and myself continuously. Enter David Anderson, Kanban thought-leader.
Now David is a really smart guy and he is passionate about his art. He’s a “center of gravity” in the Kanban universe right now. And the really cool thing about that is the attraction of all things Kanban, good and bad, to that center of gravity. If you put yourself in proximity to that center of gravity, virtually or physically, you will be exposed to so many ideas, good and bad, about Kanban. You’re also going to be exposed to the passion to evangelize and grow that David brings to the community.
When I became interested in Kanban I:
- Attended a leadership course with David
- Attended LSSC12 in Boston and Kanban Leadership Retreat in San Diego
- Started following a lot of people in the Kanban community on twitter, finding them because many of them followed David
- Started following blogs of people in the Kanban community, many found from being in the mix with that community
- Got involved in leading-edge questions and challenges with the method, many of which are being discussed by David
I had the same experience with Scrum. My perspective on Scrum was completely opened up by spending a couple days in a course with Ken Schwaber. His perspective on Scrum was so different than anyone else’s, he is very passionate about Scrum and it was such a great learning experience. I also started following @Scrumdotorg on twitter and recognized the value in finding an anchor within that community!
I had the same experience technically with CQRS, an application architectural design pattern. When I became interested in that, I started following thought-leaders in that space.
All of the “technologies” that we use have these centers of gravity that attract all of the good and bad. And there is so much learning to be gained from being in these environments!
So it’s my challenge to you today to go and find a center of gravity in a technology you are really interested in. Find a thought-leader on twitter or find their blog. Find a conference that they will be speaking at and attend. Ask them a question, or ask the community around them a question! Get involved with the communities that are swirling around these thought-leaders and take full advantage of the learning opportunities that will present themselves!
Agile Ramblings 