LeanKanban-2014 - conference overview and video presentations

Last autumn, the LeanKanban Russia 2014 management conference took place.

Two tracks, a couple dozen reports from invited Western gurus and our famous, both consultants and live top managers. Actually, I shot the video and published it promptly, in a week, but only now I’ve got my hands on what to watch and write a short review in order to orient and recommend to the potential viewer exactly what they need.

As usual, my videos are montage from several cameras and a screen, sound from a microphone, versions with English and Russian translations, and everything is awake for quick and dynamic viewing. To feel the atmosphere of all this - here is a minute video about the conference, without any special spoilers.
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The conference is purely managerial, from the topics being raised and arguments, and in some places of heavily beaten business jargon, the “spherical linear developer” will surely have butthur idiosyncrasy (“WAT ?? Processes? Innovations? Managers-idlers! Figli think it’s necessary to shake!”), but from the point of view of management, these are the most recent trends. So probably, in the megamy brain separated from the habr, the review will be the place.

Under the cut there will be a brief overview, with links to videos and other materials (ie, do not be afraid to open the page, the video is not embedded).



Actually, the name “LeanKanban” clings to the well-known keywords “Lean” and “Kanban”, and it seems to be clear about what. Unfortunately, from personal communication experience, I remember that many people think that “Lean” is something about rationalization in Japanese factories, a struggle for pennies and seconds, and “Kanban” is when glue colored stickers on boards and walls .

In fact, the main topics at this conference were:

• “Anti-fragility” in the sense of the last book by Nassim Taleb - why classical conservative strategies of “normal distribution” do not work, why it is necessary to apply “asymmetric strategies”, make backup plans, take risks and, I’m not afraid of this somewhat tortured word, “generate innovation” . Only adaptation and evolution, otherwise "survival is optional." It is symbolic that almost a month after the conference there was a “black swan” with a ruble, and it is very interesting, did the business survive for all the managers sitting in the filled halls?
• Processes - their scaling, balancing, optimization, scaling. Even without reference to specific methodologies and practices, classical analysis is Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, the search for moving bottlenecks and bottlenecks, the expansion and restructuring of organizations.
• Specific implementations of agile-processes - from the approach “in any incomprehensible situation, implement Kanban”, to a comparison between Kanban and the Scrum — the next Agile-approach, formalized.
• “Lean Startup” is a very different topic from the classic “Lean-a” (the so-called “Lean Manufacturing”) that optimizes existing processes in large companies, just like that, his famous book, Eric Rees, about the cheapest and quickest start, and about turns in searching for purpose, meaning and money. Yes, now ordinary users are forced to face the consequences of this approach every day - these are endangered services and luring landing pages (“the service for XXX is almost ready, sign up for testing” - but they didn’t even start anything) ... but alas, life is getting more and more competitive, and in a different way, you can only start with a dense financial base, and it is better to suffer the service of the quickly deceased service enthusiasts, than to learn about some facepalm epicale of multi-million state investments.
• Well, a separate topic - taxiing corporate monsters, not always even the methods of manufacturing Kanban. The connection with the main themes can be mediated, but this is a real experience, because not everyone succeeds in being at the top of a large company and not ditching it.

As for going to talk about it alive - not even the fact that this year the conference will take place (hard times have come, software management conferences, and others too, are closing), probably the closest topic is AgileDays-2015 , there will be these topics, and even many speakers.

And if the comments are typed at least five people wanting (hey, if there is life after the habr?) - I can make a torrent with audio files - yes, a lot of interesting things are lost from the screen, but for a management conference, as for business literature, this is tolerable, but You can listen in the background.

Anti-fragility - adaptability and evolution

• " Evolutionary changes through metrics - building an effective modern business " ^dopmaterials + (+ Fit for Purpose - resilience and agility in modern businesses - video in English) - David Anderson conference keynote itself - "Advert at any cost", "why are we here - nobody does not want to be the next Nokia ”, understand the value delivered to the client, segmented, at least by parameters -“ quality ”or“ speed ”, if you cannot provide everything. And one of the very first places to adapt, that is closer to the customer - delivery. We need to optimize it, and here Kanban can greatly help to build adaptive cycles. Illustrative business cases were sometimes dubious - and paranormal examples with pizzas, and surprisingly, as a positive example, expensive English cab-cabs adapted for London. But it was not even a couple of weeks after the report, how the anti-Ubernaya protests of these same super-taxists began, and in the future, of course, they certainly have no chance if they are not saved by law.

• " Think and act in a new way " ^dopmaterialy + (+ Think Anew, Act Anew - video in English) from Dave Snowden (no, this is another famous Snowden ). Here, here is just “Talebshchina” in all its glory - “resilience” beats “robustness”, “world of Pareto” beats “world of Gaus”, nontriviality of complex systems evolution, dozens of drop dead stories, can’t retell - lecture is more than an hour.

• “ It is not worth fighting with uncertainty - rethinking the approach to risk management ” ^{additional materials} . Again, “Anti- frailness ” from Donald Reinertsen (by the way, who taught Russian at school and with a bunch of curtsy - “This is the country of Kolmogorov, you all love statistics,” “Russian Tractor” has been working for forty years, ”etc.). But the report in English, so the original video → " Rethinking Robustness - Uncertainty is Not the Enemy ." About the senselessness of the struggle with uncertainty and risks of total assessment, “six sigma” processes and reinsurance of time and resource buffers. Instead of the passive strength of reinsurance buffers, one needs to “actively otkrenivanie” and gain from external influences, through fast feedback cycles and appropriate adaptability. "Stressors", "theory of options" and other Talebschina - here the speaker even directly referred to him, and of course - "delivery in small batches" + "intelligence with little blood", "fast feedback cycle", "easily part with the unnecessary" - In general, behave like a smart player.

Processes and bottlenecks

• " Patterns of scaling development " ^dopmaterials - Askhat Urazbayev in search of bottlenecks in this company of developers. No more abstract examples, pizzas and taxis, completely vital cases - how to speed up development, how the most productive employees become bottlenecks, how - elements of the theory of limitations in practice. Queues, rework, releases ... serialization of requirements, taxiing priorities, feature teams and tiger team, The Krylov Fable is not always right - you can often really break through with the help of transplanting and regrouping employees.

• “ Kanban Upgrade. Drum-Buffer-Rope " ^dopmaterials - And this is a classic exposition of classical manufactory Kanban from Taichi Ono, and Theory of Constraint Eliyahu Goldratt, and it is shown that the principles of TOC are a generalization, often necessary, of Kanban-principles (i.e., Kanban is just a private decision TOC). How often it was at Maxim Dorofeev’s trainings, there was his favorite “problem of the Bearded Man” (essentially a simplified version of the problem from Goldratt’s Rack of Hay Syndrome, by the way, I recommend a couple of reports on this task ), and half an hour of bullying the audience turning millions, used to to maximize the “depravity on investment” and they are not able to solve the simplest problem ... All with jokes that have a joke, jokes (“When trying to shove a new one, we push the previously shoved one…”), and in the additional materials there is a link to magic samoplan sparking Excel.

• “ Five important characteristics of the processes in the intellectual sphere and how they will help improve your organization ” ^dopmaterials - Yes, he says that he is all agile against the domination of metrics, everyone remembers the “quantum observation” Goodhart's law - “if the quantity has become a goal, it is useless to measure it especially in Russia ". However, there are five magic numbers - “efficiency and intensity of the flow, metrics of the theory of real options, lead time”. Of course, the question remains whether these metrics can be deceived ... Inside the report, again, praise the food industry - “the manager from McDonald's / Starbucks in three months is better versed in his business than the MBA”, again pizza, advertising the next novel about management explaining the theory of Real Options, a bit of probabilistic matan with advertisements of lognormal distributions (here I will recommend a short must-see “ Poisson burning of terms ”).

In any incomprehensible situation - implement Kanban

• “ Optimization of the supply chain with Kanban is an example from a very large Russian bank ” ^dopmaterials - treatment of the launched waterfall of the brain, with completely outraged participants of the process (“copy-paste does not work in the fields? - not a bug, because the requirements do not state”) and how “in any incomprehensible situation - introduce Kanban”. On the one hand, everything began to improve, on the other, to be honest, they told about this case six months before that at AgileDays-2014 , and after that again at SECR-2014 . I really hope that they will not raise this topic anymore.

• “ Kanban and Scrum are allies, not enemies ” ^{additional materials} - American Jonathan Hansen , but also with sympathy for us (“Photo ... This is me in Omsk - you were in Omsk? Good city ...”), and here is a video from the original track - " Kanban and Scrum - Allies not Enemies ". Breaking and optimizing SCRUM, simplifying and so the minimum rules - sucks. The SCRUM rules are the SCRUM rules “3-4-3 - 3 roles, 4 types of meetings, 3 artifacts”, otherwise Scrumbutt and Skramno will turn out. So it is better to bring Kanban with additional rules. But the Kanban or Scrum dichotomy is false. For example, Kanban can be used inside or in parallel with SCRUM, to serialize the processing of bugs, or vice versa, to serialize background jobs, such as eating a healthy epic story in the background, so that you can show some completed "normal tasks" in demonstrations. In general, this case is “kanbanization of epic stories in order to have an elephant in the background in parts, in parallel with normal tasks that can be shown” are somewhat frightening (we didn’t refuse SCRUM, we only allocate 10% of time to it, and Kanban something huge and not taken into account, if only to show something living to the customer, and not that the tests pass). IMHO, it is better to do it as it is, and at worst show the customer an infographic of the completeness of the tasks, but it is fair to evaluate and commit under real evaluations.

• “ Scaling Agile - Choosing Scrum or Kanban ” ^{additional materials} - Here more globally - the choice of methodology is considered before the start of the project, taking into account the characteristics of the project, the expectations of the customer and the teams. For a few examples (there were projects in $ 60M), there were examples of files. Pros and cons, two speakers rapporteur alternating to keep pace. By the way, there were many contradictions with the previous reports - there were even “nedokanbany”, and vice versa - it is impossible to introduce kanban in some areas (as recommended in the previous report), only as a whole. Strange experiments with economies of scale - I heard about shared Product Owners, but shared SCRUM Masters is a perversion. The topic “Kanban vs. Scrum "is inexhaustible as an atom, already six years ago I remember discussing it for five hours in a row, I will leave more references on the topic → [1] , and if suddenly these lines are read by someone wondering" Scrum? Kanban? WTF? ”, Then you a brief introduction .

Lean Startup and Innovation

• “ Lean Startup as an ability to stimulate innovation ” ^{additional materials} - The director of the Skolkovo Startup Academy, a Russian-speaking American, a former start-up entrepreneur, spoke. Here is a story about the lean / thrifty startup method itself (Steve Blang, Bob Dorf, Eric Rhys) and the applications of this method in innovative breakthroughs within large companies. Yes, the world is changing - recently the average lifetime of a company was 60 years old, now it is 15. And this is not a child’s death rate - not only young startups, dead and healthy cornified companies are dying (Kodak, Nokia ...). So only hardcore - only Customer Development, only validation of hypotheses by the "street". "Stop selling, start listening". Classic stories of a fraudulent start without a product.

• “ Creation of innovations in corporations — Intrapreneurship and start-up culture as tools ” ^{additional materials} - And this is precisely the theme of reviving healthy, petrified monsters. “In large companies, kapets are difficult with innovations ... and all this is superimposed on their power and greatness ...” ©. After all, they have only one thought - “How to perform KPI?”, And this can always be done for a short period ... What to do? "Merchant approach - everything to buy." Alas, purchased wild startups in captivity do not survive. “The managerial approach is to choose the best and organize SuperCreativeLabStudio” - no, it does not work. Even the best of the worst are still infected with bureaucracy and most likely worse than the market. “Venture approach - we sponsor the hackathon” ... Oh, all these old people's attempts to surround themselves with young people ... Everything is bad, but the superhero “Intro and Prener”, a corporate entrepreneur, has to save. Not only is it not clear where to get it from, and in any case, it will have to change a lot of things ... By the way, the new version will be read soon.

Bonus - here are a dozen reports about Lean Startup .

Corporate hell world

• “ Hoshin Kanri. Deployment of corporate policy " ^dopmaterials - The report is strongly orthogonal to the rest, where permissive cultures, agile approaches, and contempt for metrics were promoted. For there is not an IT kanban with boards and hipsters, but a real production Lean in real factories. And here we are talking about factory totalitarianism, the formation of culture with the deployment of politicians, to convey the mission to each ordinary employee. “Companies whose employees understand their mission and goals have a 29% higher productivity compared to other firms” © ... Oh, how! On the slides, sad people in helmets with quilted jackets (looks like a medieval army), in front of a diamond-shaped coat of arms with the company's mission, and a board where they must sign ... Again, they found parallels with Suvorov ... But this is not about democracy (this is anril), but about strategy for a hundred years, breakthrough vision, and only from there innovations will take ... Amazing “business games with oranges”. In general, one story is more awesome than the other ..., and even on the "X-matrix of the CEO-2020" I was completely covered. And there were "lean control dashboard" and "Navigator sustainable development screen" ... "The share of units with PI5S ..." ... metrics — tables — numbers ... Hardcore, but in real production, it is probably impossible without it.

• “ Real Change Management ” ^dopmaterials - Organizational and cultural transformation of the Russian branch of Raifasenbank. Quotes from Hitler Lenin, Helmut Moltke, Newtor. Deming cycles. It would seem - to switch to Agile - to take, issue an order and go ... but no. Even the PDCA-cycle does not work. ... everything is not easy, but of all it’s necessary to focus on goals and all employees should sing like Spice Girls “So they’re really want” ... They did a start, six key areas. The changes are brief and iterative. Communicate. Intrigue. Put the problem. Do not impose solutions. And all this at a marathon distance. The author seems to have succeeded.

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So, look, I hope this will give you fresh thoughts (not necessarily the ones that the authors had in mind). Write reviews, comments, reviews - even it will be interesting to me to read an alternative view. And for speakers and organizers it is even more interesting.

And remind - sign up if you are interested in the torrent with audio.