Todd Little is Chairman at Kanban University, the leading provider of professional Kanban management training. He is also a Founder at Accelinnova, a leadership and agility consulting group. Previously he has held executive roles as Vice President of Product Development for IHS, and Director of Software and Technology for Landmark Graphics a division of Halliburton. He has been developing or leading the development of software for over 35 years. For the past 10+ years, Todd has been a frequent presenter at Agile and Software conferences around the globe. He is a founding member and past President of the Agile Leadership Network. He has served on the Board of Directors of both the Agile Alliance and the Agile Leadership Network, and was a co-founder and Conference chair for several of the Agile20XX conferences. Todd is a co-author of the book “Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility,” Addison Wesley

Turbocharge your Scrum with Kanban

Has your Scrum implementation failed to reach the expected benefits or stalled out? You’re not alone – Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of the Scrum Framework has stated that 58% of Scrum implementations fail. The Kanban Method can help your Scrum.

Too often we hear people ask whether they should use Scrum or Kanban, or they try to make a comparison between Scrum and Kanban. This is a flawed comparison seeing each as a competing framework. Scrum is a framework that provides intentionally incomplete guidance for product development. In contrast, the Kanban Method is a management method for managed evolutionary change, or an unframework. While Scrum usually involves a transformation and a reorganization to create the teams and roles, the Kanban Method starts with what you do now and provides management guidance on continuous improvement through managed evolutionary change. The Kanban Method can be applied regardless of whether you are starting from waterfall, Scrum, SAFe, or chaos.

If you have already transformed to Scrum, then applying the Kanban Method simply means starting with Scrum and use Kanban to tackle your (Scrum)-issues one by one. Kanban will guide you with principles and practices. These principles and practices have significant and a beneficial overlap with the Scrum Framework.

Join Todd as he shares how these principles and practices of the Kanban Method look from a Scrum perspective and what a Scrum team can do to utilize the Kanban Method to improve their Scrum. Through a case study, Todd will show the Kanban Method can turbocharge your Scrum.

• Understand the basic principles and practices of The Kanban Method
• Discover those principles and practices through the lens of a Scrum practitioner
• See managed evolutionary change using the Kanban Method in action through case studies with Scrum as the starting point

The Little’s Law Game

John D. C. Little’s Law has been used in queuing theory for over half a century. It is an elegant explanation of the relationship between average throughput, Work in Progress (WIP), and cycle time. In a stable environment, it gives us a good understanding of the performance of the system which can be used for the design of our system and forecasting.

People often wonder how to go about setting WIP limits. Can Little’s Law help us with our system design? We’ll work through an example from the XIT case study to demonstrate some design considerations.

Little’s Law has also been used for forecasting using historic throughput as a predictor of future performance. But where are the estimates? Certainly, size must matter. But does it? In this workshop, we explore Little’s Law through theory and the experience of simulations. Each attendee will come away with a better understanding of Little’s Law and the core assumptions necessary for it to be applicable and useful in forecasting. Through the simulation, you will experience why the estimation of individual items is often not necessary in an environment where Little’s Law applies.

State of Leadership and Industry