John Clifford is the Managing Partner at Scrampede LLC, a boutique software organizational consultancy, where he focuses on software development, project management, team management, and organizational management principles and practices with an emphasis on Lean and Agile methodologies. John got his first software development job, at a startup, while still in college back in the early 1980s, and he started and ran a successful software company when he was 23. His career includes almost six years at Microsoft where he was one of the original developers on the Microsoft Project for Windows 1.0 team.

With more than three decades of software development and software team and group management experience, John has developed software across the spectrum of computer environments. His expertise is deep and wide, ranging from desktop and mobile and embedded device applications to low-level frameworks, device drivers, and asynchronous communications protocols.

Kanban: The Effective Way to Scale Scrum

Many organizations have had some success with single-team pilot Agile/Scrum adoptions only to struggle and fail when they attempt to roll Scrum out across the organization. The need for a solution to run Agile at scale has led to the creation of various scaling frameworks... SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, and others... yet after more than a decade there aren't any major scaling success stories supporting these options. The reason these frameworks don't help is simply this: a solution to a problem that doesn't address the problem is not a solution.

There's a proverb used by military leaders: privates study tactics, generals study logistics. Similarly, when it comes to scaling neophytes utilize frameworks, successful practitioners utilize flow. In this session I'm going to share how I've used the Kanban Method to successfully scale Scrum at several organizations, and why it works. After attending, you will have a solid understanding of the challenges of scaling, how Kanban uniquely addresses these challenges, how you can apply the principles and practices of the Kanban Method to successfully scale Scrum... and how you can explain this to your colleagues and get their buy-in.