Tag Archives: meetup

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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Customer Diversity

Posted by on 2011/08/23 No comments

Last year at xp2010 Scott E. Page talked about the benefits of diversity inside an organisation. According to Scott, diversity improves the performance and decision making process of an organisation.

Today late afternoon I attended a startup meetup event where Patrick Vlaskovits talked a bit about the diversity among customers. Based on his experience startup companies should define themselves a specific market segment – their customers – which they can serve properly and are really passionate about.

Imagine that a company works with a variety of customers. Different people want different things – sorry for the cliché – and there is no way that a startup company can deliver a feature or a set of features which satisfies all of them. This eventually will cause dissatisfaction among the customers, and they’ll leave the company. Fewer customers means less revenue or no revenue at all, and the company shuts down.

Startups aren’t necessary small companies, actually, their size does not matter that much, but their passion really does. People start companies because they have a good idea, they see something in it, and finally but not least they are passionate about it. If the “not-the-target” customer wants a feature which the company is not interested in at all, it is pretty sure that there won’t be any passion in working on that feature. Without passion the product will lose its edge, and the real (target) customers may leave.

It seems that a company can really benefit from the diversity among team members, but on the other hand, it causes trouble if we are talking about customers. Read more »

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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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Third Meetup – Open Space

Posted by on 2011/07/22 2 comments

This Wednesday we held the third event of the Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group, which was excellent in my point of view, and we had great discussions.

In the beginning we collected the following topics:

  • How to handle parked or stalled items in the workflow (8)
  • How to help people to get rid of requirement specifications (7)
  • Is it possible to implement a pure top-down pure Kanban system? (1)
  • Taiichi Ohno’s Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (9)
  • Balance between improvements and production code (11)

Everybody had three votes, and we voted on each topic in a round-robin fashion. The received votes are given in brackets. We started with the most voted topic, then we continued with the second and closed the evening with the third one. Read more »

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Meetup: Kanban Basics for Beginners

Posted by on 2011/06/24 No comments

Next week, Yuval Yeret will present at the first main event of the Budapest Lean and Kanban Meetup Group. He is going to speak about a bit more advanced topic – scalling Kanban -, so I thought it would helpful to the community to keep an introduction for those, who aren’t that familiar with Kanban.

I think we had a very good afternoon, thank you very much folks for coming, you were great!

Here are the slides I presented:

And the pictures:

See you next week.

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