Video: Troy Magennis speaks at Lean/Kanban meetup

The SoCal Lean/Kanban meetup had another excellent speaker this month in the form of Seattle-based software exec and lean thinker Troy Magennis.

Troy has studied probabilistic approaches to estimation and offers a number of extremely valuable insights and shortcuts to get better estimates and have more useful conversations with stakeholders while incurring less work.

Great stuff!

Video: Venkatesh Rao speaks at Lean/Kanban meetup

The July Lean/Kanban meetup was a big hit, thanks to the provocative and intriguing ideas of this month’s featured speaker — blogger/author/math superhero Venkatesh Rao.

Venkat kindly allowed us to record his session, which you can view below or download via Vimeo.  The presentation is also available for viewing and download on Slideshare.

Upcoming event: “Intro to Kanban” class on July 9 in Culver City

Interested in deepening your knowledge of kanban systems  and how they can be used for collaborative knowledge work (including software development)?  Want to find out why people are using kanban to improve personal productivity? Don’t miss a great opportunity for high-octane learning at very low cost.

A few of us from the West Hollywood Lean/Kanban meetup are hosting a one-day “Intro to Kanban” class on Saturday July 9th in Culver City. The format will be very interactive and we will be playing the Kanban game among many other activities.

Pricing will be $25 per attendee to cover supplies and venue-related costs.

Hope to see you there!

Resources for value stream mapping

At this month’s lively and well-attended APLN Orange County meeting, folks had a couple of very good questions about value stream mapping.  Here are some resources that can help get our learning process started.

What is a value stream?

This one-minute video is a nice overview. Definitions given:

• value = “anything that your customer will pay for”  (Note: this payment can be in goodwill, continued support, etc. — not just cash)
• waste = “anything that adds cost that your customer would not pay for”  (This often takes the form of delay, rework, and opportunity costs — not just cash expenses)

What is value stream mapping?

“Value Stream Maps exist for two purposes: to help organizations identify and end wasteful activities.

Finding problems and creating a more efficient process isn’t easy; even the best organization can be made more efficient and effective. But bringing about substantive organizational change that actually eliminates waste is a tall order. It’s comparatively easy to identify waste, but it’s another matter entirely to stop waste from happening in the first place.

Value Stream Maps can both sharpen an organization’s skills in identifying waste and help drive needed change.”

— from “How and why to create Value Stream Maps for software engineering projects” by IBM’s Ted Rivera.

Value streams and Kanban boards

In many cases, we are able to take a value stream map and convert it into a real-time information radiator– for instance, in the form of a kanban board.  The Kanban solution in particular is extremely useful because it allows us to regulate flow and pressure in the system.  It’s important to note, though, that a kanban layout is only one of many options for visualization. See Kenji Hiranabe’s excellent article on this topic, which also includes a number of great pictures and diagrams.

Where can I learn more?

Alan Shalloway and his company Net Objectives have number of great resources on this topic, including

• Blog post, “Why a kanban board is a value stream map but a Scrum board isn’t”
• Video presentation, “Mapping a value stream to a kanban board”

Dennis Stevens is a lean guru who works closely with IT managers and executives. His white paper “Taming the Agile Enterprise — Value Stream Mapping for Knowledge Work” is an excellent resource for deeper study.

The “Visual Management Blog” by Xavier Quesada Allue  isn’t updated much these days, but the articles are still very  useful. I recommend this one and this one in particular.

Jim Womack published an in-depth article in “Manufacturing Engineering” magazine that is valuable even though it is quite technical and also takes a more manufacturing-oriented approach. Not the right first stop in your learning journey, but a great check-in point as you become more comfortable with these concepts.