Lean Kanban France 2015

Lean Kanban France 2015 is the 4th parisian edition of this great 2-days conference. Attending this event is for me the opportunity to re-connect with the lean/agile community AND to listen to great talks from international speakers as Olaf Lewitz, Mattias Skarin, Karl Scotland, Don Reinertsen or Vasco Duarte.

It is a great opportunity to see how big (and not that big), local and international companies deal with Lean culture and Kanban techniques.

And as we discussed with Olaf, this has been a very good energy event!

This year, I noticed various types of people who were giving sessions:

• some give feedback from their journey through their own agile transformation
• some propose evolutions of the practices based on a sane inspect and adapt process (no estimates)
• some put in practice some theories (transform 12 principles from a book into a Manifesto and a 7-points methodology)
• some combine various practices to build new tools (Popcorn flow)
• some try to determine trends on what's next (Pablo)
• some apply the same tools as the corporation does, but with a different mindset (Olaf)

Other trend I can see is that talks are more and more polarized between “processes and techniques” and “humans and their interactions”. This second pole was not that strong at the previous editions of the conference, but also, the first pole was not so radical too. As if, behind common practices people were developing different schools of thoughts. And apart from a gradation between these two poles, there is the talk by Pablo Pernot that is just a category itself ;o)

The following twitter quotes reflect the sessions I attended during the event and the messages that I liked, or questioned me, and the tools that I think could be useful in specific contexts.

Introduction keynote by Karl Scotland (@kjscotland) "Turn your organization into a laboratory with strategy deployment"

Session of Olaf Lewitz (@OlafLewitz) "Integral quality"

Extra thought about options from another session :

Sesion of Pierre Neis (@elpedromajor) "How to start my kanban board"

Mid-day keynote by Claudio Perrone (@agilesensei) "Popcorn Flow - Continuous evolution through ultra-rapid experimentation"

"Popcorn" is an acronym for Problem / Options / Possible experiments / Commitment / Ongoing / Review / Next (and when you put it on a board, you shall add a Done column at the end).

Session of Pablo Pernot (@pablopernot) "Topologie Lean"

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Morning keynote by Vasco Duarte (@duarte_vasco) "No estimates : how you can predict the release date of your project without estimating"

Here are the 10 principles Vasco uses to describe #NoEstimates

1. trust your system or build a new one
2. shorten the feedback cycle
3. believe the data, not the estimates
4. use alternatives to make decisions - never correlated to the value for the business of the company
5. test for value first then test for functionality
6. estimation is waste, reduce its impact on your biz
7. measure progress only on running software
8. learn to understand your system (metrics, lead time, throughput ...)
9. use methods with a proven track record
10. the transformation starts with you

Session of Pierre Hervouet - Thankfullness, the bottleneckof every improvement process

Session of Severin Legras - Metrics manifesto or how to change the metrics culture The manifesto is based on 12 principles from the book Workout by Jurgen Apello

Based on this, Severin Legras and his colleague designed a methodology

1. Define the scope of the measure
2. Clarify the strategy an define objectives
3. identify the variables
4. choose the parameters that can be measured
5. identify the key indicators and define the alert values
6. validate the measure system
7. design the dashboard

And finally, an extra tip based on a discussion with Don Reinertsen: it is interesting to see the evolution of the ideas of the speakers year after year, and how they refine their thoughts. This is for sure impossible when you transformed one time your thoughts into a certification course, because you have "freezed" those thoughts, and then you have to "hide" evolutions of them because a certification can't evolve that fast (and you decently cannot say that what you teach since months is not true anymore).

Read more articles about this conference (in french):

Croisement de point de vue by Philippe BRIEREDon Reinertsen's 2nd generation Lean Product Development by Ludovic GRANOZIOMichel-Ange et des HiPPO by Marilyn KOLPour ne pas estimer, il faut être agile by Philippe BRIERE