February 2 Meeting
Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:45 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:45 to 6:55
Presentation from 6:55 to 7:55
Doors close at 8:30
Personal Kanban and Kanban for Distributed Teams
presented by Jim Benson
Kanban is rapidly gaining popularity in software development. How are teams and programmers migrating from straight agile to Kanban, or to hybrids like Scrumban or Scrow? How has this worked in the past? How do distributed teams make this more challenging? How can managers and teams best apply these new methodologies?
Jim Benson describes introducing both Agile and Kanban to development teams, focusing on a team he led in 2007 which built a complex transportation management prototype using nascent technologies and a team of cowboys – none of whom had used agile or been particularly collaborative before. How did he do this?
The answer: Subversion!
Let Jim take you on a journey of mystery and intrigue as he tells you how he fooled a bunch of programming malcontents into being a Lean, collaborative, highly effective work force. It’s like the A-Team, but with Skype.
Biography
Jim Benson is the owner of Modus Cooperandi, Inc, (www.moduscooperandi.com) which is dedicated to teaching knowledge workers how to collaborate and play nice. Modus does this through teaching lean principles. His clients at Modus have included NBC Universal, British Telecom, Boeing, Intuit, JackBe, Depiction, the World Bank and the United Nations. While at Modus, Jim has launched the Personal Kanban methodology for managing personal and small team work. (www.personalkanban.com)
Previously, Jim owned Gray Hill Solutions, (www.grayhillsolutions.com) which created collaborative software for government. Gray Hill specialized in “bloody” projects where bleeding edge technologies were deployed or where other firms had left a project in burning, fetid shambles. Clients included The Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, WSDOT, ODOT, CalTrans, The Cities of Seattle, Bothell, Mercer Island, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, San Diego, Portland, and Anaheim, as well as counties of King, Orange and Los Angeles. Gray Hill created solutions for traffic, urban forestry, pesticide management, watershed management, fire prevention, and emergency management.
Before that, Jim was an urban planner and it gets even crazier.
Jim Blogs at http://ourfounder.typepad.com
You must come see Jim speak at SeaSPIN.