Tag Archives: Kanban

Speaking at ITREND 2011

Posted by on 2011/11/19 No comments

I was invited to a local conference called  ITREND 2011, where I talked about how to use customer diversity analysis, Kanban and eXtreme Programming in order to have less unexpected business changes in one’s organisation. I was really looking forward to this event because of two reasons: first, it was held in my hometown Miskolc, Hungary at the University where I studied and work, and second, I finally saw a chance to tell students about recent software development methods, because I knew that this topic wasn’t covered in their curriculum.
My talk was at the technical track in the afternoon along with a talk about clouds by Tibor Koenig from Microsoft and a talk about developing on mobile platform using hybrid – web and native – methods by Gabor Gyenes from IND. Based on the feedbacks, the audience liked our talks and additionally, it was good to see so many students there. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the morning sessions. They started well, there were very interesting talks – except the panel talk about the future of the mobile platforms -, about trends and how to get money for a starting business, but the death by powerpoint effect ruined a couple of the presentations. Additionally, a guy gave a presentation about the success story of his company, but he managed to lengthen his talk from 15 minutes to 50 minutes so everything afterwards started one hour later than scheduled. Anyway, it was great to be back and I also managed to talk to a couple of my old friends, but it was sad that nobody showed up from the IT faculty.

Back to the technical track, here are my slides:

Thank you very much for coming, see you next time!

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Rating: 9.7/10 (3 votes cast)

Visit at Cluj Napoca

Posted by on 2011/10/30 No comments

My old friend Victor invited me to Cluj Napoca, Romania to talk about software development in practice. There were three talks in the morning at his company evoline and a fourth talk late afternoon at the local meetup group.

We started the day with an introduction to Kanban, because the audience knew about Agile, but Kanban was something new, and additionally we needed it for the maintenance-related presentation:

After a short break we continued with a longer talk about maintenance and how to use Agile, Lean, Kanban and leadership techniques in order to stabilise a maintenance situation:

The last presentation was about how to use Agile techniques without saying Agile:

My talk at the meetup became a bit longer than I expected, but we had – at least I felt like that – a great discussion how the software development process evolved at Digital Natives – my current company – and, uniquely, we talked about what we were doing right and where we failed:

I promised a list of books worth reading. So here are they in a recommended reading order:

  1. Taiichi Ohno – Toyota Production System
  2. Henrik Kniberg – Lean from the Trenches
  3. Daniel H. Pink – Drive
  4. 37 signals – Rework
  5. David J. Anderson – Kanban

Even though it was a long journey and an even longer day, I enjoyed it very much. The audiences were great, and I got some very usable feedback on the style and content of the presentation (I’d like to specially thank Dragos, Cătălin and Victor for the detailed and more personal feedback), so I can improve my future talks. My next talk will be at my former employer Ericsson, and I’m going to talk about leadership and measurements.

Thank you folks for the possibility, it was my pleasure!

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Rating: 9.5/10 (2 votes cast)

Our Detective’s Blackboard

Posted by on 2011/09/06 No comments

My colleague Attila and I had an interesting discussion several days ago:

- Zsolt, I feel that sometimes we are missing the big picture.
- That’s not cool, and it may explain the high number of work items moved back.
- Maybe, but can we do planning together again? I miss it.
- Sure we can, but no regular planning meetings, right?
- Of course not.

As my friend @keksz_i pointed out, regular planning meetings aren’t that effective and I’m also not a great fan of them: talking to the product owner is a brilliant idea, but the traditional task breakdown is just a tremendous waste of time. After our discussion, it was clear to us that we had to bring the planning back, but we needed something new, something effective. So we came up with the following detective’s blackboard for our next feature:

It is drawn on a large piece of paper and hangs on the wall right next to our Kanban board. It has all the information we need in order to do our work: the big picture, how our user interfaces will look like and how they will communicate with other parts of the application. Additionally, we also have work items, prioritisation, test plan and estimation.

Read more »

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Brown Bag Lunch Talk: Measure and Manage Flow

Posted by on 2011/09/03 No comments

This Tuesday, I had my first brown bag lunch talk at prezi, where I talked about measuring and managing the flow. Here are my slides:

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Meetup: Kanban in 5 Minutes

Posted by on 2011/08/04 No comments

Yesterday evening I gave a 5 minute long lightning talk at Bp New Tech Meetup about Kanban focusing on the measure and manage flow principle.

Here are my slides:

Thanks for coming and listening to my talk!

P.S: since five minutes aren’t enough for presenting the whole principle, I’m going to write a post about it soon.

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