Lean Software and Systems Conference 2012 Day Two

I recently attended the 2012 edition of the Lean Software and Systems Conference. Here's my summary of the second day.

Gregory Howell - Lessons Learned in Lean Construction
Very similar to previous work I've seen from Hal Macomber and Mary Poppendieck but it's good to hear from the original.

Triggered by this talk, I finally got around to getting Building Trust but I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed...

Benjamin Mitchell - What Comes After Visualising the Work? Conversations for Double Loop Changes in Mindset

Thoughts triggered by this talk:

• I try to assume a reasonable, humane person as a default rather than assume nothing about intent.  In other words, ask the humanising question: "Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do that?"  See Crucial Conversations Skills.
• I suspect flawed memories and assuming most behaviour is cognitive is what leads to two apparent theories of action
• I wonder if the reason why people don't share rationale is because they assume other people are unreasonable or incompetent.  Therefore to encourage sharing of rationale, we need to address how one attributes cause.  See Six Sources of Influence.

Jeff Patton - Lean & Kanban Myths, Misconceptions and Forgotten Principles

• "No I am not Adam Savage."

What Jeff Patton knows about Kanban:

• Every package of sticky notes comes with two shapes: a square and a diamond."
• Your backlog contains "bets" (aka aspirational value)

The Underpants Gnomes model for business:

Jeff described a variant of Tim Brown's definition of Design Thinking:

Ignite & Lightning Talks
Tip if you want to do an Ignite talk: Effective presenting in the Ignite style is not about perfect timing but more design focus and adaptation

Someone from BTI360 gave a very interesting talk about implementing Lean Thinking in an auto shop.

Claudio Perrone - A3 Thinking and Kaizen

• Things improved sharply once we began celebrating the completion of each story

Kaizen memo to capture improvement experiments:

Mary Poppendieck - Continuous Feedback: Process Control for Developing Software-Intensive Systems

I just caught the tail end of this which ended up being an interesting question about the relationship between Success Assured, Set-Based Design vs MVP, A/B Testing.

There are a few things that come to mind:

• Set-based Design and MVPs are both about exploring the solution space
• Set-based Design is about exploring the solution space independent of any particular problem space
• Typical MVP approaches are like point-based iterations but it can be a set of parallel MVPs.  A recent HBR article talks about this: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/dont_let_the_minimum_win_over.html

Lean Startup for Change

Yuval Yeret, Jeff Anderson and few other people I don't remember got together for an ad-hoc session using Lean Coffee format to discussion Lean Startup for Change (#ls4chg).

Yuval has a good summary here: http://yuvalyeret.com/2012/05/16/so-what-is-lean-startup-for-change-ls4chg/

Next up: Day 3