Pixar Pitch for Kanban — My LKUK13 Talk

once upon a time we had a great time going agile for single projects/teams then once we grew successful we got the enterprises interested. some of us forgot our roots and used waterfall to go agile some of us just joined the party without even having an agile heart and then it didn’t turn out so great. it didn’t stick. it created resistance. people fell back to old ways. if it wasn’t for the continuing stream of new “suckers” it would be a dark period for the agile movement.

and then some of us started realizing that we should use agile to go agile and that this is what we had in mind all along (whether Scrum or Kanban). We realized that concepts like intrinsic motivation, opt-in and self-organization should be used for the way we go agile not just as agile itself. Some of us also recalled some cool marketing concepts like “Crossing the Chasm” that also apply in the enterprise change management world.

And then we started treating the enterprise as a market for change and leverage the guidance of the “chasm” model. We focused on innovators and early adopters. We focused on the leaders first in order to create the best improvement/change engine possible and validate as early as possible that indeed we are in the right direction. We used success to create a beachhead which allowed us to pull in pragmatists.

We leveraged a catalog of patterns/practices, realizing that they shoudn’t be a “bible” but more a useful list of options, in order to help pragmatists which didn’t want to invent the wheel but just get return on investment fast. We helped organizations drive the market by setting the right measures of success. We saw a “hockey stick” and realized we need to manage the changes in progress or scale the team helping those changes happen or find ways for the change to happen with less involvement.

We started seeing enterprises that are really becoming more agile, not just due to number of certified scrum masters or SAFe practitioners or Kanban practitioners they have or the fact they run dailies or sprints or have kanban boards. But based on how a growing and influential group of people think and act and what kinds of changes they drive in their domains. This is the next generation of enterprise agility case studies. Coming to a conference near you in 2014. See you then!

So - what do you think?

While you digest I will use the rest of the Israeli holidays downtime to make progress on my last talk for this fall - Avoiding the Ganttban…

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