On April 22nd in Atlanta, the Lean Software & Systems consortium recognized significant contributions from two prominent members of the Kanban community: David Joyce, for his leadership of Kanban adoption at BBC Worldwide; and Alisson Vale for the exemplary performance of his business Phidelis and his leadership and contribution to the South American / Brazilian Agile community.

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

Check out the new Tools page in the Resources section of the Limited WIP Society site.  This includes established tools for lean and kanban and some tools still in development.

http://www.limitedwipsociety.org/resources/tools/

There is still room for more! If you want to develop a kanban tool, be sure to check out the Kanban Tool Product Manager Cheat Sheet

Keith Swenson, a new subscriber to the “kanbandev” Yahoo group, explains some of the parallels he sees between the Toyota Production System and current ideas about Lean/Agile software development.

Whether Toyota’s manufacturing practices and concepts, such as “waste”, can be mapped usefully to software development is a regular topic of debate on the mailing list.

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 are interested in the history and application of kanban then Jon Miller over at Gemba Panta Rei blog has put together this highly amusing piece that includes the growth of kanban into the software engineering field. Be sure to read it all the way to the end. The Amazing Adventures of Kanban.