Marcus Hammarberg, co-author of “Kanban in Action” talks with Craig at YOW! West in Perth in a sometimes noisy coffee shop at the Parmelia Hilton Perth:

• Craig’s quote on the book! “No mucking around … gets to the heart of kanban from the first page. A must-read!”
• originally from Sweden, now working for The Salvation Army in Indonesia helping them become more effective
• bitten by the Agile bug by demonstrating something embarrassingly small at the end of a sprint and yet he found the stakeholders were overjoyed at just seeing movement
• Agile has changed many things that used to manual to be automated, such as testing and deployment, to fit in short cycles
• Fred George’s talk “Agile Roots: Use JIT to Go Faster” at YOW! West (slides / video)
• Marcus’ talks at YOW! West “Kanban in Action – A Practical Whirlwind Tour of Kanban” (slides / video) and “Impact Mapping: Drawing is Not the Point” (slides)
• other books on Kanban include Henrik Kniberg’s “Kanban and Scrum – Making the Most of Both“, and David J. Anderson’s “Kanban” and “Lessons in Agile Management“
• Kanban slides on SlideShare led to writing the book with Manning
• recommend “The Goal” by Eli Goldratt, the content is boring but the intriguing story keeps you reading
• Kanban is trustworthy due to its principles: start where you are, limit the work in process, manage flow from idea to production
• sprint is a crazy word, when running a physical marathon you should keep a pace that allows you to continue a conversation
• slack will always occur, so plan for it, idle people is OK, we sell ideas not keystrokes per minute
• “you can’t be more productive than not delivering a feature” – John Smart
• recommended books include “Turn The Ship Around” by David Marquet (also see the TED talk) and “Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux
• lessons we can learn from IT – simple visualisations, data that makes sense (you can’t improve what you can’t measure), be transparent on what is being worked on and meeting every day
• not an Agile Coach but a Social Worker

TheAgileRevolution-107 (42 minutes)