09.15.09
Hanging out my kanban
Well, there you have it. I made my choice! I’m hanging out my shingle, striking out on my own, etc. People keep asking me if I’m excited. Terrified is, I think, more appropriate.
But I am not completely alone. I’ll be working very closely with these guys. Just to give you an idea of how hip this group is, take a look at their office! Yep, it’s a boat and, yes, they have a nice view of Lake Erie and the Cleveland skyline.
This new opportunity will give me the privilege of continuing to pursue my passion: helping software development teams have a lot of fun making real progress on real projects.
It seems that the current Agile Hype is around Kanban, so I thought I’d tie that in as well. I am both impressed with and concerned about kanban for software development, a new-ish methodology taking ideas from Lean and from the Toyota Production System (TPS). There are many great ideas in this newest evolutionary step in Agile: a focus on quality, limiting work-in-process, balancing demand against throughput, effective prioritization, pull don’t push, continual improvement, eliminating waste, and many more. All of these are powerful concepts (David Anderson gave an excellent talk on kanban, which you can find here).
Why the concern? Well, it seems that certain other Agile methodologies have ended up being more about creating marketable intellectual property than solving real-world problems. And I think that’s an easy trap to fall into. Marketing an idea is important to it’s survival, and that is going to create tension. As long as those behind the Kanban approach stay focused on solving real-world problems, we’ll be fine, but they will have to fight against the urge to over-market their ideas.
I hope they succeed, because I think this latest incarnation of Agile is a very good thing! And I’m looking forward to proving that out over the next several months while watching kanban for software development continually improve!
Craig Livingston said,
October 7, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Hey Paul! Hope you are well!
I’m on a team which has been using Kanban for about a year now, and we feel it has been an excellent fit. Now, our team is small, 3 people. I’m curious as to how well Kanban scales with larger teams.
The last team I was on used a SCRUMmish process, which frankly I didn’t care much for. But that’s more feeling than factual.
Regardless, hope all is well, sounds like things are great. Drop me a line sometime, I was talking to Shaila and the topic of “Gosh, wonder how Paul is?” came up.
Pablosan said,
October 7, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Heya Craig!
Thanks for the comments! Things are going very well so far. Being out on my own has been a bit scary, but also exciting. I’m learning a great deal every day, which is very important to me.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any experience using Kanban with larger teams. My guess is it would scale quite well, as it is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS), which was used on their production line. I’m guessing that’s a pretty big team!
You might be interested in checking out the kanbandev group on Yahoo! Groups: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/kanbandev/