Saturday 19 October 2013

Next Meeting: Kitchener, Nov. 12, 5:30-7:00, Bernadette Dario speaking: Double K: Kanban and Kata

The next meeting of our group will take place on November 12 at the usual place in Kitchener.  Here is the RSVP page.

We're excited to announce our next speaker, Bernadette Dario!

Bernadette is an Agile and Kanban coach currently working at a public sector organization. For the past 1 ½ years, she has been heavily involved in a large enterprise-wide transformation initiative.

Bernadette has over 18 years of experience in Information Technology, progressively fulfilling the roles of a technical writer, developer, tester, and project manager in multinational Manufacturing & Distribution, as well as Consulting companies. In 2001, she joined an offshore company experimenting with Extreme Programming. This turned out to be her first exposure to Agile practices. Her first deliverable was to put a lightweight methodology in place to guide the XP teams. Since then, she has focused on the process side of software development, helping teams utilize both structured (CMMI) and lightweight (Agile) frameworks to enhance product delivery.

Bernadette is also a Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) recognized by the Lean-Kanban University.

Here is the abstract of her talk:

Building mutual trust between internal IT teams and the Business is not easy. Inadequate transparency, insufficient collaboration, and unmanaged expectations are some of the reasons for the lack of trust. IT teams in this situation often find it difficult to successfully deliver software that meets Business expectations. More so, these teams find themselves preoccupied with firefighting and delivery only, with no time left to look into improvements.

In this session, I will talk about the journey of two IT teams to continuous improvement using Kanban and Kata. I will share how they utilized Kanban practices to gain the trust of the Business and establish a true partnership.  I will also discuss how the teams used the Improvement and Coaching Kata framework to plan, execute and validate data-driven improvements utilizing short experimentation cycles.

The time of the meeting almost the same: 5:30-7:00.  The doors will be open at 5.  If you prefer to network with other attendees before the presentation, please feel free to arrive a bit earlier.  Or you can arrive just in time for the feature presentation at 5:30.

AgileTour Toronto 2013 On October 29

You can still register for the biggest annual Agile conference in our region: the 2013 AgileTour Toronto.  We highly recommend that our group members turn out for this event on October 29, connect with fellow practitioners, coaches and managers, confer and learn.

You can still register for this conference on their Web site.

Included in the conference program are several sessions about several Lean topics, modern management methods and continuous improvement.  For example, Jeff Anderson and Alexis Hui who spoke to our group about a year ago will present the latest from the evolution of their Lean Change method.  There will be sessions on Lean Startup, A3 Thinking, Agile management among others.  You can check out the whole conference program here.  Several Kanban Coaching Professionals (KCPs) will be in attendance as well, so you can ask them any question about Kanban you might have.

We hope to see you at the conference!