Modern Management Methods: Lean Kanban North America 2014

Now that we’ve optimized development, it’s time to get the rest of the company on board. While agile methods have benefitted product development, few have managed their impact on product management. We’ll look beyond the product team to the entire process from idea to creation to delivery to customers. Based on the ebook From Fragile to Agile: agile beyond the product team.

When working in a medium-sized or large organization, usually a lot of different teams/departments are involved in developing and especially maintaining a successful product. Often the challenge is not so much to make single teams/departments more efficient. Instead, it‘s mostly about how teams/departments interact with each other. Poor performance (long lead times, low quality, rework, customer dissatisfaction) resulting from a lack of efficient inter-team collaboration can be observed in many different organizations. And interestingly, it is also exactly what Systems Thinking tells us: " A system is more than the sum of its parts. It’s the product of their interactions. " (R. Ackoff).

In this talk I will give a short overview over Systems Thinking and present a case study from Jimdo, where we introduced "Open Prioritization Meetings" to enable coordination and collaboration of >15 teams in a service-orientated manner.

For many 21st century companies software provides competitive advantage. Delivering software faster and of a higher quality has a direct impact on the business bottom line. But according to the Standish Groups CHAOS report only a third of projects are successful with two thirds being late, cancelled or not delivering the functionality requested. The business process of software delivery is broken and it is time to fix it, it is time to apply Lean to the business process of software delivery. In this talk Dave West, Chief Product Officer at Tasktop and former Forrester Analyst discusses how Lean needs to be applied to ALM. He will describe what Lean ALM will look like and how by making software flow organizations can effectively increase delivery velocity, make better decisions and deploy software that will deliver increased business value.

Improving prioritization has become a tired concept in most IT departments, and yet it has the potential to change the conversation from one of cutting cost, to delivering valuable solutions as quick as the business needs it.

Most organizations don’t suffer from a lack of innovative ideas, they suffer from not being able to pick the best of what turns out to be a bad bunch. Thanks to the consumerization of IT and software eating the world this is getting worse. Innovation and software development is already synonymous in most organizations. As Jack Welch says: If you are not moving at the speed of the marketplace you’re already dead – you just haven’t stopped breathing yet.

So how do we improve the way we prioritise to ensure that we’re delivering value quickly and not wasting our precious capacity to innovate? Since economics is all about scarcity, we can turn to economics to help us quickly discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.

In this talk we will discuss how Cost of Delay enabled a Fortune 500 company to discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value across $100m portfolio to:

1. Improve Prioritisation – by using CD3 (Cost of Delay Divided by Duration)

2. Improve Decision-making – by making the economic trade-offs visible

3. Change the Focus – from efficiency and cost to speed and value

There’s tremendous confusion about how product management works for Agile software development companies. Beyond the mechanics of Agile/Kanban and user stories, how do we define/build products that answer broad market needs that also resonate with large groups of customers and deliver revenue? There’s been a split between high-level product planning and detailed software implementation. During this session, we’ll unpack goals, roles, and the skills needed to deliver great products with revenue impact.