7 January 2009  
Kanban for Sustaining Systems Engineering

IndigoBlue, in partnership with Modus Cooperandi, are proud to announce the Lean management training course, Kanban for Sustaining Systems Engineering.

Corey Ladas will be running a number of courses throughout Q4 2008 and Q1 2009.

Why Kanban?

Agile practices have supercharged development teams, but skills such as prioritization, optimising work-in-progress, and continuous improvement remain elusive. Kanban has been proven effective in these areas allowing Agile teams to deliver more value to their customers more quickly.

Modus Cooperandi and IndigoBlue have been using Kanban to help clients deliver an increased flow of value to their customers and make their Agile processes even more effective.

Click here to pre-register for this course.

The Value

Kanban has been proven to increase organizational maturity by:

  • Reducing time to market for critical features
  • Creating context for scheduling and prioritization
  • Increasing responsiveness to changing market conditions;
  • Aligning goals of technical resources to goals of your company
  • Creating a culture of continuous improvement
  • Increasing communication between software engineering and marketing
  • Providing better quantitative and qualitative management of value delivery
  • Reducing waste
  • Increasing throughput

The Format

Session Details Duration
Coffee and ice breaker Meet the other course attendees, Modus Cooperandi and IndigoBlue teams. 60 min
Session 1 Understanding Value and Flow
Lean Thinking and Theory of Constraints in Software Development
Exercise: Value stream mapping
Exercise: Batch size games


30 min

15 min
15 min

Session 2 Understanding Pull
XIT Case Study
Kanban Basics
RRT Case Study
Exercise: Kanban Simulation


90 min

30 min

Lunch Lunch 60 min
Session 3 Organizational Design
Kanban Deployment
Exercise: Workcell Design Workshop

60 min
30 min
Session 4 Kanban in Context
Estimating and Prioritizing
Planning
Metrics and Reporting

30 min
30 min
30 min
No Host Bar Socializing hour 60 min


What you will learn
  • An introduction to Lean, Pull Systems and Kanban
  • 4 areas of focus to deliver success
  • Value Stream Mapping Process
  • Flow Tracking
  • Implementing different classes of service
  • Implementing a culture of continuous improvement (Kaizen)
  • How established industrial engineering theory can apply to software development process
  • Controlling WIP Identifying bottlenecks
  • Classifying bottlenecks as capacity constrained resources or non-instant availability resources
  • Managing bottlenecks appropriately for improved throughput Understanding transaction and coordination costs in a Kanban process
  • Defining release and input cadence for a Kanban system Negotiating service level agreements with customers
  • Using Metrics and Reporting to drive continuous improvement
  • Establishing policies to prevent abuse and gaming of the Kanban system

 


Corey Ladas

Corey is a recognized leader in the application of Lean theory to the software development and product management processes.

He participated in a series of product development process definition initiatives for Microsoft product groups, culminating in a process architect role on the Microsoft Engineering Excellence team.

Corey has been a proponent of iterative and evolutionary design methods since the early 1990’s, and was an early practitioner and vocal promoter of Agile methods at Microsoft.

Corey has an equal passion for rigorous engineering practices, creating hybrid agile/formal methods since the dawn of the Agile movement.

Corey began collaborating with David Anderson at Microsoft in 2004, united by a common interest in the application of Lean, Theory of Constraints, and Statistical Process Control methods to software development.

In 2007, Corey joined David at Corbis to implement Kanban systems for the development of enterprise IT projects.
Corey’s musings on lean, Kanban, and other methodology topics can be found at http://www.LeanSoftwareEngineering.com