Read the official announcement

Read David Joyce’s acceptance speech

The announcement of the award came as a surprise to almost everyone in attendance at the Speaker’s Recognition Luncheon during the Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010. It was the best kept secret of the event.

The award recognizes outstanding achievement, leadership and community contribution in the field of Lean applied to software development, IT work and systems engineering.

The Lean SSC acknowledges the Agile Alliance as its inspiration. The Gordon Pask Award now in its 5th year has been shown to be a positive influence on the Agile community. In turn, it has given its winners the status of “tenured professors” within the community. The winners are able to propose unfashionable, counter-intuitive or dissenting ideas and the community will respect their opinion and pay attention. As such, the Pask Award has been a force for inclusion and diversity within the Agile community. It is intended that the Brickell Key Award will do the same for the emerging Lean software and systems community.

The Award is named for the man made island off Miami, where the Mandarin Oriental hotel is situated. The Mandarin Oriental played host to the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference where the Lean Software & Systems Consortium was formed and the community came together for the first time.

The board of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium made a unanimous decision on the selection of the first recipients of the award.

David Joyce was selected for his achievement in leading a significant adoption of Kanban across BBC Worldwide and spreading the idea virally into the BBC public broadcasting system. In his position as a development manager, David did not have positional authority to impose change on the many teams that have adopted his ideas. Instead he led by example and provided service to others to help them adopt.

As the results became evident he started to spread the word wider within the BBC and within the London and UK Agile community. He started blogging and sharing his results with a still wider audience. His work came to the attention of senior leadership and a presentation on Kanban was given to the COO of BBC Worldwide.

David has been able to show tangible business benefit for the changes and increased revenue recognition as a direct result of adopting Kanban. As such he has given the whole community a tremendous reference site that acts as a permission giver for many others within the media industry and across other business domains. Many new Kanban implementations have already happened as a result of David’s work and the association of tangible business success from Kanban adoption at such a world renowned brand name company.

Read Alisson Vale’s blog acknowledgment.

Alisson Vale was also a very obvious choice as a first recipient of the award. His work building Phidelis into a slick, high maturity, lean software product company is unsurpassed. He has set a bar to which the rest of the community aspire. His ideas on leadership, business alignment, visualization of work and management have inspired many. His presentation and paper for Lean & Kanban 2009 impressed everyone. His latest thinking on visualization tooling leads the industry, combining social media with kanban and workflow management.

Phidelis demonstrates business benefit from Kanban by actively delivering new working software to its customers several times per week. The company has used a flow-based approach to software development for over 2 years. There have been no projects at Phidelis during this time and yet hundreds of new deliveries to customers.

In addition, Alisson has been an active member of the Agile community in Brazil and has recently contributed a 10,000 word chapter on Kanban for a Portuguese language book on Agile Methods.

The Brickell Key Award prize includes a laser-engraved crystal trophy, an invitation to join the Technical Advisory Board of the Lean Software & Systems Consortium, an all expenses paid invite to Lean Software & Systems 2011 in Los Angeles, California, plus funding to attend one other international conference during the next 12 months.

The announcement of the award and the choice of winners is a tribute to the contribution of kanban systems in growing the adoption of Lean concepts in the IT industry and in the contribution of the Kanban community, through the Limited WIP Society, in making this happen. Please take the opportunity to congratulate David and Alisson and reflect on how far this community has come in less than three years since August 2007.

David J. Anderson
Vice President, Lean Software & Systems Consortium
Chair, Lean Software & Systems Conference 2010

1. Visualize Workflow
2. Limit work-in-progress
3. Measure & Manage Flow
4. Make Process Policies Explicit
5. Use Models to Recognize Improvement Opportunities

These properties represent facets of an organizational process that have been present on all Kanban implementations that I’ve been involved with. They are written in a rough order of focus or implementation. So all 5 properties may not be present initially but over time they should appear providing the leadership/management is dedicated to successful evolutionary approach to change using Kanban.

Visualize Workflow is subtle. It is beyond visualization of work – the concept I pushed hard with my Agile Management book. Visualizing workflow is about revealing the mechanism, the interactions, the handoffs, the queues, buffers, waiting and delays that are involved in the production of a piece of valuable software.

Limit work-in-progress implies the introduction of a pull system from a family of possible solutions: CONWIP, DBR, CapWIP, Kanban.

Measure & Manage Flow highlights a focus on keeping work moving and using the need for flow as the driver for improvement. A focus on flow rather than on waste removal is in my opinion a higher mastery of Lean and much less likely to lead to “Lean and Mean” anti-patterns and dysfunction.

Make process policies explicit is another level of visualization. It’s about holding up a mirror to the working reality and encouraging the whole team and its leadership to reflect on its effectiveness. Thinking of a process as a set of policies rather than a workflow is a very powerful technique.

Use models to recognize improvement opportunities shows that Kanban is quantitative and takes a scientific approach to improvements. The three models I focus on in the book and in most of my teaching are: The Theory of Constraints; an Understanding of Variation and the System of Profound Knowledge; and the Lean models of Waste and Flow, though I teach waste as economic costs rather than the manufacturing-centric approach that is typical.

In my next blog I’ll discuss the properties that didn’t make the cut and why not!

]]> http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/2010/04/11/five-core-properties-of-a-kanban-implementation/feed/ 2 http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/2009/11/20/make-your-own-t-shirt/ http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/2009/11/20/make-your-own-t-shirt/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:43:12 +0000 davidanderson http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/?p=322 I’ve decided to make the vector graphic files for the limitedwipsociety.org t-shirts available so you can download them and take them to your own printing company and make your own shirts.

Any stock photography use to make these is licensed and paid for. My design contribution is available under a creative commons license. So you can use these designs with impunity but if you make derivative work you need to credit and acknowledge my contribution.

Get the .ai files as a .zip download now.

If you want to use these assets on your site just paste the HTML code provided straight into your web source code or content management system.

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Go Lean Limit WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/GoLeanLimitWIPOrange.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Go Lean Limit WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/GoLeanLimitWIPGreen.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Go Lean Limit WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/GoLeanLimitWIPBrown.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Registration and the Call for Papers is now open at atlanta2010.leanssc.org

The first 50 registrants enjoy a super early discount rate of $800 plus entry to the exclusive speaker luncheon and a special limited edition Ltd WIP Society t-shirt, sponsored by David J. Anderson & Associates.

The Call for papers closes on December 14th.

Use the Twitter search tag #lssc10 to filter tweets about the event. Follow @lssc10 on Twitter for news from the organizing team.

If you are speaking or attending the conference you might like to tell people about it by adding these buttons to your web site design. If you want to use these assets on your site just paste the HTML code provided straight into your web source code or content management system.

Source: <a href=”http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/”><img alt=”Atlanta 2010 Attendee” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/lssc10/Atlanta2010Attendee.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://atlanta2010.leanssc.org/”><img alt=”Atlanta 2010 Speaker” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/lssc10/Atlanta2010Speaker.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Conference Chair: David J. Anderson

Track Chairs: Alan Shalloway, Joshua Kerievsky, James Sutton, Eric Willeke, Chris Shinkle, Richard Turner & David Anderson

Event Planner: Kelly Wilson
Organizing Sponsor: Software Engineering Professionals (SEP)
Event Team: Dennis Stevens, Janice Linden-Reed, Aaron Sanders, Eric Landes

Sponsorship opportunities email info@leanssc.org

We’ve made a series of t-shirts, tank tops, and other goodies like mugs, mouse mats and clocks available with the spiffy new Limited WIP Society logo and the “Yes We Kanban” motif.

LWS Store

Get your now from our LtdWIPSociety store at Cafe Press.

These videos were created by InfoQ. Unfortunately InfoQ were unable to use the footage as it didn’t match their required format. They very kindly donated the full content to the community and SEP stepped up and offered to host them.

If you didn’t manage to get to Miami for the inaugural Lean & Kanban conference then you can now watch all the presentations with the exception of Alan Shalloway’s key note from the Friday session. Watch now

If you want to use these assets on your site just paste the HTML code provided straight into your web source code or content management system.

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Yes We Kanban” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/yeswekanban.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Yes We Kanban” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/yeswekanbansm.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Vote Ltd WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/voteltdwip.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Vote Ltd WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/voteltdwipsm.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Advocate Ltd WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/ltdadvocate.png” border=”0″ /></a>

Source: <a href=”http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/”><img alt=”Advocate Ltd WIP” src=”http://www.agilemanagement.net/ltdwip/ltdadvocatesm.png” border=”0″ /></a>

More alternative assets to come soon. And yes, the face in the Yes We Kanban is Taiichi Ohno

1. Flexibility in workflow design
2. Flexibility in reporting
3. Canned reports should include cumulative flow & cycle time spectral analysis and both should allow defined start and end dates and shouldn’t be tied to releases
4. WIP Limits across steps in the workflow
5. WIP Limit over-ride with audit trail
6. Swim lane support
7. Colored card support
8. Decorate cards with icons
9. Hierarchical work item / card support with two tiered display. Ideally, hierarchy should be deeper then 2 levels, to support existing processes such as FDD with hierarchical backlogs.
10. Allow swim lanes to be assigned to hierarchical support, class of service or work item type
11. Allow color to be assigned to class or service or work item type
12. Allow icon decoration to be assigned to class of service or work item type
13. Allow person cards to be stacked on work cards
14. Support for target cycle time per class or service and status reporting on due date performance and likelihood of due date achievement – highlighting of time remaining or time expired
15. Allocation of WIP limits across swiml anes and colors of cards i.e. allocation of WIP limits across classes of service and work item types
16. WIP limits on two tiered hierarchies

Nice to have features

1. Support for SPC charts on WIP, velocity and cycle time
2. Animated replay
3. Enforced class of service pull policies i.e. system should highlight which item should be pulled next
4. Simulation – ability to predict which release a particular card will be delivered in
5. Canned report for daily-delta, showing what changed since yesterday
6. Ability to host multiple boards, representing different teams on different projects sharing product level goals i.e. a program rolling up together with some dependent integration
7. On-screen policy definitions, configurable by project/initiative/value-stream describing rules and classes of service

Please comment and suggest other features I have overlooked.