Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in a one day Kanban workshop by AgileSparks.
The workshop was intended for leaders and managers and so one morning I found myself sitting in a conference room with project managers, team leaders and one VP. Although it meant that not everything I learned was directly related to my day to day job I learnt quite a lot on how other parts of the organization view the development team – it was an eye opening experience.
The workshop was conducted by Yuval Yeret in a very agile way – in the beginning he asked us to write on sticky notes what we want to accomplish (yellow) and our questions regarding Kanban (purple). These notes joined other notes that Yuval has prepared each containing one of the subjects learned in the workshop in the course task board that had columns for to-do, learning, practice and done. I guess that a task board for a course was not enough because he also tracked the course progress using a burn chart – and it worked we were able to ask questions, have discussions and side step and the course changed according to what we wanted to learn about.
We’ve started by defining what is “agile” – which meant different things for different people, Some preferred to name practices such as TDD, SCRUM, daily meetings while other teams defined agile by its principles i.e. embrace change, get feedback from the product owner and so on.
After a short presentation about Kanban and a simple exercise to make sure we understood the basics we’ve played a game – each team was a company that used Kanban (obviously) to manage their tasks. After playing this game we had a good idea how to practice Kanban and what we should do in our organization – which was a good thing because it was time to go out to lunch
To be continued…
Labels: Agile