It's more than 10 years since we documented the results from the first Kanban system at Microsoft's IT department. Kanban is now ubiquitous with adoption around the world in companies large and small. Implementations of 5000 people or more are numerous. No one questions whether Kanban is a good idea or not. It just is! And of course you should do it!

But the truth is almost all of these implementations are shallow proto-Kanban that fail to implement an end-to-end pull system. While these shallow systems produce tangible benefits they fail to deliver the 200-700% productivity gains and 90%+ reductions in lead time seen in the early implementations a decade ago. The truth is firms are struggling to get to "pull" at large scale.

This new keynote will look at six problems, which deep Kanban implementations addressed and which practitioners in shallow proto-Kanban implementations don't yet address or even acknowledge. It will then provide six pragmatic actions you can take to make the paradigm shift to "pull" and leverage the economic benefits that it promises.

In this session, Professor Julian Birkinshaw will talk about the key ideas from his forthcoming book “Fast Forward” where he argues that the current obsession with big data and data-driven decision making is overstated. A common problem among large firms is to try to match their internal complexity with the challenges in the business environment, resulting in slow, bureaucratic decision making and analysis paralysis. The argument in Fast Forward is the firms that succeed in the future will be those that understand the limitations as much as the benefits of information, and in particular it will be the ones that are able to foster a culture of decisive action allied to emotional conviction. 

Professor Birkinshaw will argue that to address the changing sources of advantage in the business world, firms need to develop a new organising model, the adhocracy, to complement the traditional emphasis in large firms for bureaucracy and meritocracy.  He will also describe what the adhocracy model means for you as leaders and line managers.

Lean is the most spread management concept in the world. It is applied within all types of functions in almost every industry. Recent research however shows that there are much more to learn. During this lecture Niklas Modig, author of one of the most sold lean books of all time, will challenge us regarding what “true” operational excellence is. As the only Japanese speaking foreign researcher in the world, Niklas has spent thousands of hours inside Toyota Japan decoding their philosophy and way of working. He will share his latest insights and help us explore how we can take our improvement initiatives to the next level. He will talk about the efficiency paradox and why all companies should prioritize flow efficiency in front of resource efficiency.

He will also talk about Jidoka, which he argues is one of the most misunderstood and underestimated concepts within the Toyota Production System. Niklas argues that Jidoka is THE engine behind the capability-building-capability of Toyota. 

This session will present the exciting Kanban story of Ping An Insurance, the biggest Chinese private-owned financial group. Adam Wu, the speaker, has been working closely with Ping An as an external coach for 5 years. He will explain how Kanban system gradually be adopted from team level, project level to portfolio level, until the first CEO Kanban established. He will share the first-hand experience on how he helped this traditional financial group fit into the internet era, through scaling the business volume dramatically, shortening lead time by 2 or 3 times, never missing deadline, and ensuing the agility and lean in business value.

In this talk I will share my personal experience of implementing and living in a Holacracy organization.  I will also explain why I deeply believe that today's organizational challenges can't be solved by any „social technology“, but by a transformation of mindset, attitudes and beliefs. They need to be created, out of a new thinking, a different need and transformational insights. I will explore on what this new thinking looks like and how parts of Holacracy could play a useful role in manifesting a new paradigm of leading, thinking and working.

"I've had the opportunity to work in a, for me a Western IT guy, very different setting; for the Salvation Army, in a Indonesian Hospital. At first I was a bit concerned to see if my knowledge and practices would translate in this setting. But as it turned out they did, in a very practical way. 

In this talk I will describe how the basic ideas of Kanban, Lean and Agile helped us to save a hospital from bankruptcy (or worse!). Twice.

I hope that I will not only move you with the story but also give you that same deeping knowledge that I got by seeing the kanban principles and practices applied in a very different setting and culture than the one where we usually see them applied."

 Based in Barcelona, is the World's 2nd largest online travel agency. The airline tickets line of business had a massive backlog of work. Discussion between IT and business people was difficult and planning was time consuming and problematic.

By leveraging ideas of risk profiling from Enterprise Services Planning together with real option theory and Discovery Kanban coupled to hypothesis driven development from Lean Startup, we revolutionized how planning happens, created share language for prioritization across the company and dramatically changed our culture, enabling us to bring valuable features to market faster and improve our competitiveness.

This experience report will tell you what we did and how made it work.

In kanban systems, demand is balanced with the capability of a process by limiting the work in progress in the system. This approach is embedded in the Kanban Method as its second “General Practice”, and this might lead you to thinking that it's the only game in town when demand outstrips your capacity to service the demand. However Kanban is more powerful than that. This presentation explores so called "irrefutable demand", for example when a higher level service has committed delivery of an item, and needs capability from other services to make the delivery.

Knowing your options involves understanding of a number important concepts in Kanban, such as Deferred Commitment, Managing Flow, Cadences, Resource Management, Staff Liquidity, Classes of Service and Cost of Delay. It requires the feedback within and between services to have the right cadence to ensure variation in demand does not cause congestion collapse, but enables an holistic approach to managing the network of interconnected services, and effective decision-making in periods of high demand.

This presentation introduces these concepts, pointing the way to effective application of Kanban - at scale - in a wide variety of organisations.

Principles can be used as powerful Leadership-tools. Leaders in an agile environment are always in the desperate need to provide direction (Vision), boundaries (constraints) and purpose (why we are here) so that people commit to 100%. These days we still find advice/tools to lead with a set of (bureaucratic) rules, but people neither want follow nor commit to something that they get told or they did not create by their own. The Burning Man Event in Nevada, USA, gives a perfect example how you can lead more than 70.000 people with a set of principles... which are created and owned by all of them. The organization behind burningman established a community that guides and leads itself in vision, boundaries and purpose. Most corporates are coming from “the opposite site“, but tackle the same problem. We ́ll learn what that different side is and what ́s common.

What is Servant Leadership? Is it just "Leadership for nice guys" or “unblocking all the things and getting out of the way”? In this session, Mike Burrows would like both to challenge these common misrepresentations of this classic leadership model and to show Servant Leadership’s present-day relevance to the challenges of Lean-Agile transformation.

We'll explore six transformation strategies (honestly, with their respective pitfalls) and for each of them discover opportunities for demonstrating and developing Servant Leadership.

Let us say something obvious. Estimating is hard. So how come that we at Lunar Logic barely remember times when it was an issue? 

The standard approach to estimation is based on expert guesses. This means that subconsciously we make ourselves vulnerable to cognitive biases which render our estimates too optimistic and unreliable. That neither is fun for development teams nor provides much value to clients.

We already know a better strategy. Instead of relying on vulnerable human memory we use the actual historical data and run statistical simulations to produce a forecast. Not only is the outcome significantly better than what expert guess provides but also it requires less work from development teams.

Even though the theory of applying Monte Carlo simulations is appealing, its adoption in professional context is slow. We will explore how a few simple models and tools can help us to improve the outcome of our estimation effort. After all, our goal is not to get perfect data but simply to get data that is better that what we are doing right now.

It’s not just the theory. We will back up our story with how we are using statistical forecasting and most importantly where it falls short. Ultimately, if our 90% confidence level turns out to be true 3 times out of 4 it means that we are not living in a perfect world.

Most Kanban systems today only focus on a part of the end-to-end flow. They start from an identified need – i.e. a customer order such as a work item that is “Ready to develop”.

They typically end at the point before validation by the customer – i.e. a work item that is “Ready to Accept”. Their focus is on system lead time (time from “Ready to develop” to “Ready to Accept”) and putting a boundary around the team (“ring fencing”) to foster a meaningful work environment for the team to collaborate in and to better serve the customer. While this has a great merit, it has an even greater merit to move from just serving the customer towards true collaboration with the customer across the entire end-to-end flow to explore suspected needs (so called “Ideas”), turn them into identified needs (“Customer orders”) and validate whether needs are satisfied (“Satisfied needs”).

Through case studies we will explore Kanban systems that cover this end-to-end flow and its associated customer lead time – the time between suspected and satisfied need. We will see how Upstream Kanban (with its minimal options) as well as one-stage Customer Kanban (based on CONWIP) both play a crucial role. By doing so, we will go back to the roots of Kanban as a way to foster the collaboration between customer and supplier.

Prioritization and planning across over 25 autonomous teams is hard. Especially when all work on their own contribution to department and organization goals. It gets harder when there are more than a dozen departments like this and some of them have dependencies with your own department. For over a year we have been collecting practices on how to encourage autonomy whilst keeping alignment over the departments and within teams.

This talk is about how to do portfolio planning and prioritization at scale based on experiences within one of the largest banks in The Netherlands . We have developed practices on how to plan with teams and departments based on what will bring us closer to our goals. 

Innovation, cross sales and better operations are three good reasons for collaborating. Other reasons might be comfortable, but are overall just waste. In this talk, I will guide you through the steps of creating a great environment for disciplined collaboration. We’ll look at barriers to collaboration – with examples – as well as how to create your custom solution to countering these barriers with the right levers.

I will discuss the background and insight that led to the need for change, essentially why we felt the traditional agency model was broken and that unless something changed it would no longer work for us and our clients. 

As with all change this has not been a straightforward process. All clients have different demands on them and in turn they require different things from their agencies which has meant that we have had a multitude of challenges to overcome. I will focus on one below that have been the most difficult to overcome:

• Getting clients to understand the value of the work they do and how prioritising that work effectively can have great benefits to their returns.
• Moving clients away from the reliance on unwieldy specification documents and a ‘hands off’ approach and instead getting them involved in everyday decision.
• Managing to keep clients excited when we are talking MVP and continuous delivery and no creative ‘big bang’.
• The amount of education required internally in our organisation and with our clients to achieve a mindset change.

As the average life expectancy of Fortune 500 companies falls, the need to react quickly to market changes or seize market opportunities becomes increasingly important. Large organisations, however, struggle to move quickly enough.

In this talk, Ollie speaks about how, often, the problem can be attributed to a lack of clearly understood strategy, and an inability to make strategic choices.That inability can also be frustrating for teams and lead to a feeling of being disjointed from a bigger purpose, and an over-reliance on management 'above' them. In the end, they slow down.

Ollie will suggest developing a visible hierarchy of business goals and outcomes can be a great way to communicate your strategy and contextualise teams' work. At ThoughtWorks they call this the Lean Value Tree, and it can be a really powerful way to unlock the potential of agile teams. With a clear understanding of outcomes to be achieved, and the intent behind them, teams can autonomously ideate, experiment and innovate to continually improve the product, and react much more quickly to market changes.

- Hi! I have a thing I’d like to share with you!

- Oh, no problem. Only thing is, I’m on my way to a meeting. Could we meet at 11 tomorrow instead? I have a slot then.

- Let me see… No, that doesn’t work for me. Ah, I have a slot at 14 tomorrow. Would that work?

- Sorry, can’t do, and then the remainder of the week is fully booked. What about next week?

Being stuck in these types of conversations, I ended up doing some calculations to understand what is going on. I’d like to share them with you!

It seems like everyone has heard about cognitive biases - especially since Nobel price winner Kahneman published his book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" back in 2011. In knowledge work, making smart decisions can be considered as one of the most critical capabilities every organizaion is dependant on. If it‘s true that cognitive biases systematically lead to deviations from rational judgement, their importance cannot be overrated.

So what do we do about it in our daily work? There seem to be two major issues here: 1) While there‘s tons of stories and scientific articles on the negative effects of cognitive biases, there‘s very little advice on how to mitigate them; 2) In the Lean and Agile communities, we often refer to the principles and practices that might work against biases, but we simply ignore the things that reinforce them (which is, of course, pure confirmation bias).

In this talk I will share my biggest failures regarding cognitive biases (worst practices if you will) and propose some simple, down-to-earth countermeasures that might help to decrease the effects of cognitive biases. The examples are taken from different areas like management, hiring and moderation/facilitation

Often, we just naively give up control, for example by handing it over to self organizing teams. But when we do that, we actually deprive those teams of important perspectives, information and skills. Not suprisingly, decisions made by those teams turn out to suboptimal, at the best. So we are forced to take back control, to ensure success.

The Mututal Learning Model by Roger Schwarz proposes an alternative to this vicious cycle: giving up the assumption that anyone can fully understand a situation, and that therefore any disagreement in judgement of a situation primarily stems from inappropriate communication.

I will present the Mutual Learning Model together with its five values and eight ground rules, reinforced by the eight steps of collaborative creation from Emergent Essence Dynamics. There will be lots of real life examples, and I plan to incorporate some lightweight interactive exercises for the audience (depending on the length of the presentation).

Extroverted, loud, fast mono-cultured collaboration is now a real threat to effectiveness – drowning out alternative thought, squeezing away contemplation time, and beige-ifying decisions and strong leadership.   And in that environment, dysfunction is virally morphing into further roadblocks to Agile/Lean.

Consider: Recent research seems to be indicating that psychopathy is not as valued in collaborative work environments as it may have been.  But whilst we might be pleased with that idea, it also seems that Narcissism and Machiavellianism are thriving instead. The 'Dark Side' is adapting. This is what Katherine calls ‘Dark Collaboration’.

In this talk, Katherine utilizes eastern and western thinking models to expose this new viral threat to Agile/Lean methodology and offers simple, effective and practical ways to trigger insight on how we might overcome ‘Dark Collaboration’ - drawing from her recent experiences guiding a corporate division through a tough merger and implementing a division wide restructure in the first 6 months of this year.

As people, ee love 'one model', 'one idea', 'one way to see and manage things'. The 'vanity of small differences' makes us fight over little differences: Scrum over Scrumbut over Kanban over shallow Kanban ... call it whatsoever. 

What we sometimes forget over the little disputes is the bigger picture: what am I actually doing? 

In this talk, I want to explain in which phases of a product life cycle the ideas and tools and the mindset of lean actually support the work on a product, in which phases it might not and when it might actually be harmful and why.

New to the Kanban Method? Maybe you heard about it and want to learn more? Maybe you think you know what Kanban is and want to challenge your knowledge about Kanban? Than this talk is the perfect place to start the conference.

Wolfgang will give you an introduction to the principles and practices of the Kanban Method. You’ll learn how the Kanban Method can help to improve and where you should start with your Kanban initiative.

In der Software-Entwicklung tauchen zwei Fragen immer wieder auf: "Wie lang dauert das?" und "wieviel wird es kosten?". Durch die Kanban-Methode hat in den letzten Jahren die Verwendung von probabilistischem Forecasting zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen zunehmend an Popularität gewonnen. Im Gegensatz zu Expertenschätzungen bedient man sich dabei vor allem historischer Daten und versucht so einen Zielkorridor zu bestimmen, in dem mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit die Antwort zu finden ist.

Damit diese Methode einen konkreten Wert für die Planung hat und auch zu Geschäftsentscheidungen herangezogen werden kann, sollte der Korridor möglichst klein sein. In der Praxis stellen viele Anwender fest, dass ihre Forecasts leider nicht verlässlich genug sind. Dabei sind es meist nur Kleinigkeiten, die eine große Wirkung haben und den Unterschied ausmachen.

In diesem Vortrag zeige ich Ihnen anhand von Beispielen die häufigsten Fallstricke, die auf dem Weg zum sinnvollen Einsatz von Forecasting liegen und gebe Tipps, wie man sie umgeht und die Genauigkeit der gemachten Vorhersagen erhöht.

“Flow bezeichnet das als beglückend erlebte Gefühl eines mentalen Zustandes völliger Vertiefung und restlosen Aufgehens in einer Tätigkeit, die wie von selbst vor sich geht – auf Deutsch in etwa Schaffens- bzw. Tätigkeitsrausch oder auch Funktionslust.” (frei nach Wikipedia)

Das klingt fantastisch und natürlich wünschen wir uns genau das für die Teams mit denen wir arbeiten. Und wir erfahren immer wieder, wie schwer es ist Flow zu kreieren und dann vor allem auch kontinuierlich zu etablieren.

Beim Mini-Golfen, beim Snowbaorden , an der Supermarktkasse, bei der Essensausgabe in Kantinen… In diesem Talk decken wir auf warum es bei alltäglichen Situationen meist keinen Flow gibt, wie einfach es wäre in diesen Situationen Flow zu etablieren und zeigen die Parallelen zur Arbeit in Kanban-Teams.

Agile Methoden wie Scrum und Kanban haben ihren Siegeszug durch die Organisationen angetreten und sind in vielen Firmen der de-facto-Standard für eine moderne Ablauforganisation geworden. Nach dem Erfolg auf der Teamebene gerät in den letzten Jahren zunehmend das Thema "Skalierbarkeit" auf die Agenda. Die klassische Aufbauorganisation bleibt vielerorts unangetastet, gerät jedoch mit dem Einzug der Agilität zusehends unter Druck. Von "Servant Leadership" über "Management 3.0" bis "Reinventing Organizations" gibt es Anstösse, wie eine moderne Aufbauorgansation aussehen könnte, die Hand in Hand mit der agilen Ablauforganisation spielt und in der Lage ist, die erreichte Flexibilität und Veränderungsgeschwindigkeit zu honorieren. Klar ist auch: Mit dem Eintritt der Generation Y und ihrer Nachfolger in den Arbeitsmarkt verändern sich die Ansprüche an Organisationen dramatisch. Kooperation wird wichtiger, Hierarchien werden hinterfragt, Strukturen müssen veränderbar sein. Die These: Für die Organisation der Zukunft sind Lernfähigkeit und schnelle Entscheidungsfähigkeit die zentralen Kriterien - klassische Organisationen kranken genau an diesen Schlüsseleigenschaften. Während Kanban die Organisation hinsichtlich der Lieferung von Services optimiert und dabei erwiesenermassen ein skalierbares Framework für Informationsaustausch und Lernen aus der Ablauforganisation heraus schafft stellt sich die Frage: Welchen Mustern muss eine moderne Aufbauorganisation genügen und wie könnte sie aussehen?

Nach wie vor, werden viele Unternehmen Top-Down nach dem Motto "divide et impera" (Teile und Herrsche) gesteuert: Das strategische Unternehmensziel wird in Bereichsziele runtergebrochen, die in Abteilungszeile runtergebrochen werden etc. Über einen mehrstufigen Prozess landet man dann bei individuellen Zielvereinbarungen für jeden einzelnen Mitarbeiter - mitunter sogar kombiniert mit Boni oder Versprechen auf Gehaltserhöhungen.

Dieses Schema hat Drucker vor Jahrzehnten unter dem Namen "Management by Objectives" (MbO) propagiert und in etwas abgewandelter Form erlebt der Ansatz unter dem Namen "Objective Key Results" (OKR) zur Zeit eine Renaissance. Deming und andere haben MbO heftig dafür kritisiert, dass es lokale Optimierungen erzeugt und damit dysfunktional für das große Ganze ist.

Der Vortrag stellt mit dem Nordstern-Konzept eine alternative Steuerungsmöglichkeit für Unternehmen vor, die kein iteratives Herunterbrechen von Zielen erfordert. Statt der Ergebnisse stehen die Prozesse zum Erzielen der Ergebnisse im Vordergrund. Damit werden die Gefahren des klassischen MbO vermieden. Man könnte aber auch wie Mike Rother argumentieren, die Arbeit mit dem Nordstern sei "Management by Objectives done right".

Wenn man in Richtung hoher Team-Performance optimiert, bekommt man hohe Team-Performance. Das klingt ja super! Ist es aber leider nicht. Hohe Team-Leistung führt zu geringer System-Leistung was zur Folge hat, dass die Leistung dem Kunden gegenüber abnimmt. Das ist nicht so gut, denn unterm Strich werden die Gehälter vom Kunden bezahlt und nicht von hoch performanten Teams. 

Genau dieser Teamfokus ist auch der Grund, warum viele agile Initiativen zu keiner Verbesserung der Unternehmensleistung führen. Im besten Fall sieht man bei team-zentrierten Verbesserungsinitiativen keine Veränderung auf Unternehmensebene, im Normalfall wird die Leistung sogar schlechter. Lokale Optimierung führt zu globaler Suboptimierung! 

In dieser Session zeige ich, warum man versuchen soll, lokale Optimierung zu vermeiden. Ich zeige auch anhand eines Beispiels, wie man die Agilität teamübergreifend in der Organisation etabliert, ohne dabei die Teams bei ihrer Arbeit zu stören. Das Schöne bei diesem Ansatz ist, dass er nahtlos am Ist-Zustand der Organisation anknüpft.

Was nehmen Sie wahr, während Sie diesen Text lesen? Sitzen Sie? Spüren Sie den Stuhl oder das Sofa unter Ihnen? Oder stehen Sie gerade auf der Konferenz, haben gerade etwas in der Pause gegessen? Welchen Geschmack haben Sie gerade im Mund? Welche Geräusche hören Sie? Ist es laut?

Wenn Sie in sich hineingehört und die Fragen für sich beantwortet haben, sind Sie gerade ein wenig aufmerksamer geworden. Sie haben sich bewusster mit Ihrer Umwelt auseinander gesetzt als Sie das wahrscheinlich normalerweise tun. Sie haben einen kurzen Moment im "Sein"-Modus gelebt. Sie haben das quasi automatische "Tun" unterbrochen und Ihr Leben beobachtet. Fällt Ihnen das schwer? Ist es unangenehm? Das ist okay.

Meditation und Aufmerksamkeit für das eigene Leben machen nachweislich glücklicher. "10% happier" verspricht Dan Harris auf dem Cover seines Buches über Meditation. Obwohl es schwer ist, Gefühle zu quantifizieren, ist schon etwas dran: Bewussteres Leben macht glücklicher.

Lassen Sie uns diesen Effekt auf unsere Arbeitswelt übertragen. Die ist nämlich auch ständig im automatisch ablaufenden "Tun"-Modus: Hetze, Stress, Überlastung, geringe Wertschätzung – Zustandsbeschreibung für das, was ich meistens bei meinen Kunden vorfinde. Schaffen wir Gelegenheiten, in den "Sein"-Modus überzugehen. Schaffen wir die Mechanismen, um aufmerksam für den Zustand unserer Arbeit zu werden. Aus dieser Aufmerksamkeit heraus können wir auftretende Probleme angehen.