Blocker Clustering

For all those who attended one of my Kanban training classes, the blocker cluster is definitely nothing new. I’m already talking about it for about three years. However, we extended the general idea with a nice heuristic which tells you which cluster you should solve fist. Furthermore, we also presented a simulation approach which calculates the economics behind blocker clusters. Putting a Euro sign in front of a blocker cluster is a very compelling reason to work on it! Here are the slides to our session:

Kanban at Scale

As one of the speakers dropped out, I had the pleasure to do another session. I chose the topic Scaling Kanban because this whole scaling Agile thing seems to be a quite big topic today. In the beginning I tried to address some common misconceptions of agility at scale. In my opinion, the biggest misbelief is that agile teams make an agile organization. I’m always a little bit surprised why the whole world decides to do improvements on team level by “installing” Agile methodologies. Don’t be surprised if this does not scale. An organization is more than a container of teams – it’s a living social system. The good news is that Kanban is not a team method and thus, Kanban cannot not scale. Kanban is inherent scalable. As you might know, I’m totally not a fan of theoretical statements that sound good but don’t have any practical relevance. I worked too long at the University 😉 That’s why I decided not to elaborate theoretical thoughts but I rather presented a case study where we applied Kanban on a 200 people program. See the slides here:

In my opinion, #LKCE14 was again an awesome event! Special thanks to Florian Eisenberg & Wolfgang Wiedenroth who really did a great job in organizing the event!! I’m very much looking forward to #LKCE15!