Jesper Boeg, Trifork Software Pilot

Jesper has worked as Agile Coach and Developer at Trifork for the past 4 years. He has a Masters degree from Aalborg University in the area of Information Systems and wrote his thesis on how to successfully manage distributed software teams.

With a relentless Lean focus Jesper helps teams adopt Agile practises and break down the organisational and personal boundaries standing in the way. He believes that lack of communication is the root to all evil, and trust can only be established through an unrelenting focus on transparency in the entire organisation. Jesper's work is guided by high level Lean principles and believes that to achieve success one must look at the entire value stream and focus on the establishment of flow and a zero-defect mentality through continuous improvement.

Bringing "Agility back in Agile" have been keywords for Jesper's work lately. It is his experience that specific Agile Best Practices rule sets are enforced in many organisations, which is unhealthy in terms of continuous improvement and counter to the values of Agile. Ultimately restricting teams from using the resources at hand effectively and adapt to the context they are faced with.

Presentation: "Introduction and Overview of Wednesday's Tracks"

Time: Wednesday 09:00 - 09:20

Location: Metropolitan Ballroom

Abstract: Ryan Slobojan and Wednesday Track Hosts will present the program and provide a short introduction to the Tracks scheduled for Wednesday.

Presentation: "Raising the bar: Using Kanban and Lean to super optimize your Agile implementation"

Track: Agile Evolution

Time: Wednesday 10:35 - 11:35

Location: Stanford Room

Abstract: Doing just fine with Scrum but always wondered if you could do better? Do you have a gut feeling that some Agile best practices don't fit your needs? Are you tired of limiting your product delivery to 24 times a year?

Kanban and Lean can help us better understand the nature of Agile and the reason why popular Cargo Cult implementations often fail or can be vastly improved. But since this means that agile best practices like estimation, fixed iterations, cross functional teams, specific roles and iteration retrospectives are no longer mandatory some perceive Kanban and Lean Product Development (LPD) as threats to the Agile culture and mindset.

In this session we will explore how Kanban and LPD differ from traditional Agile methods. We will go through a series of steps that show how practices can be dropped, changed and restructured to the benefit of both the development team and the customer and how breaking your Agile addiction can increase flow, feedback and quality.

Having gone through the transition to Kanban it is our experience that Lean offers a unique way of rediscovering the agile vision. Traditional Agile methods may be a perfect fit in unique circumstances but they often come at a cost and may turn out to be an unnecessarily expensive solution in your particular context.

Keywords: Lean Product Development, Agile, Kanban, process, project management, product development, organization, culture, quality.

Target audience: All who take part in software product development and delivery: Technical leads, Team leads, development managers, business developers and software engineers.