Kanban - german edition of David Anderson's classic published

This post is refererring to Arne Roock's Blog Post on the publishing of David Anderson's already classic 'Kanban' wich is now also released in german. The book was translated into German by Arne and Henning Wolf. The publishing was celebrated at the OOP 2011 in Munich with some events and talks on the topic and David made no secret out of the German edition being updated in some chapters and containing an additional chapter by me.

The German cover - quite different

I can only imagine how hard a task this was, as to me the original is already a nice, soft read focusing on the purpose and motivation of Kanban and reflecting this in a very soft and understanding way. I followed the translation from the beginning and have to take my hat off on how well this book was transferred into German. If you get hold of the book, just after a few pages you will realize how good the translation is - especially compared to other books in our industry.

As mentioned before, I contributed one chapter to this book, the last chapter in fact. In this chapter, I describe how we apply Kanban to Portfolio Management at my work at mobile.international GmbH, owner of Europe's largest car classified site. My latest view on what we're doing with this is that we are managing demand load on the system that is provided by our PD department. Actually, we are managing the waiting queue for our department. From a distance, every project needs to wait in two waiting queues. One is more simple but has more impact. This queue is the portfolio management. The second queue is the actual PD workflow, in which every committed project is realized. The whole system is roughly the equivalent of a shop where you also have to manage two queues (if you're in bad luck ;): First you have to stand in line to enter the shop (if demand is high enough - or actually: too high) an then you have to manage the queues in front of the till. You don't want to have customers waiting in any of these two queues for two long. But for this not to happen you have to actively manage the queue length - and give it all you got. (The better metaphore might be an airport, where you mostly have to queue up twice: check-in and security - basically quick ckck-in machines are then a better way of portfolio management with less overhead and security, well ... let's not think of the TSA nowadays ...)

I may expand on that in a future blog post or article. I actually gave myself the task to try to find out which queue has what impact on the whole system.

If you have a closer look on the 2nd queue, the PD department itself, you can see that this queuing system consists of quite a few queues itself - from requirements to delivery. And this makes clear the task of the PD department - apart from just delivering projects the task is trying to deliver the projects in a way that the queues are short and the 'customers' are happy because the queues are short and stuff is delivered with short wait cycles. And, oh boy, here we find livers the dime a dozen ;)

Actually with the publish of the German edition of David's Epic I was humbled twice. First, in the foreword Arne and Henning mention me in a way that is just too kind - but one should never should say no to compliments. And second, I was quite stunned and humbled when I was asked by David, Arne and Henning if I would like to contribute a chapter to this book. The idea came up after I visited the Lean Kanban Belgium 2010 conference (quite well organized by Agile Minds Belgium - I will come back to this great conference as well as the LESS 2010 in Helsinki in my conference summary of 2010 later in this blog), where I held a talk just on this topic, which was attended by David and some other smart guys and where we had a lively discussion on the topic. So, in fact, the topic actually hit a nerve and resonated well with this great audience so that the idea stuck to write the whole thing down. Thanks again for giving me the chance, guys :-)

So there you have it - grab a copy, read the book, read my chapter, give it some reviews on amazon and give me or the other guys involved some feedback via Email or twitter. We would be happy!

Edit: A great in depth description of a Kanban introduction given by Henning and Arne to celebrate the publish of their translation is given here by Markus Gärtner.

The (success of the) iPhone will be a midget to (that of the) the iPad

Edit: This is just a reporting of an old blog post of mine from another blog. I haven't been that wrong - which is ok, given the blog and press reaction of the skeptics at the time. But Ibhave to say that Android adoption goes up at my workplace and that Honeycomb still isn't my cup of tea, UI and UX wise but it might work well on the tablet market.

Years ago, early in the morning I stood in from of our offices. I work at a geek place definitely. I, a geek myself, work at a geek place, definitely. The evening before I just received my iPhone.

The clumsy procedure involved me having to drive to an ugly customs office with depressed and demotivated customs guys having a ball on trying to make me feel illegal because the iPhone was still supposed to be illegal when you unlock it. Yes, and I tried to save the import tax ;-) Anyway, I drove home and had the iPhone set up in 5 minutes time, I had it unlocked and jailbreaked in another 5 minutes. And I had all the music I needed synced in another 5 minutes, I guess.

Standing in the cold in the front of my office it didn’t take long and other geeks working at my place came along. the iPhone thing was quite new and I still an early adopter. The other early adopter syndrome plagued guy, my brother, didn’t yet have it. I knew right away what would happen: Hide or be bashed. And so it was: All the gees at work were so smart: Oh, you don’t know there’s no copy and paste? You surely know, it’s only Edge, no 3G, do you? You know the camera is crap compared to my 5MB Ericsson/Nokia, you name it bla bla device - and so on and so on.

What was bothering me right away was the fact that all the guys were working for  the same company as I did - an internet company making a fortune on an internet product. So, I guess they shouldn’t be blind to the fact that all the shortcomings of the iPhone were more than compensated by the incredible and before unseen simplicity and elegance of the User Interface - and that despite of all the innovation behind it.

At the time they were all waiting for some new fancy linux based PDA or this and that or the newset fancy Nokia with any useless navigation on it and god knows what.

You know what happened. Today they all have iPhones. All of them. They even disrespect it (some of them) by placing it in a strange dock beneath their work station. Sure, the new cool thing for a developer is the Android (the good vs. the bad - again, so it’s good that google makes a statement towards China so that they are bit more ‘good’ again ;-)

And now - dejá vu - the whole geek planet is again complaining about the things the iPad is *not* and thus being blind to see what the iPad is and what its potential is. (And all the opportunities it will open for geeks and developers as well).

But guess what: It is a mass market device. Apple does not enter markets anymore with niche products to gain momentum. They have momentum and can directly address the large crowds.

Geeks may be disappointed by the iPad not having USB, exchangeable battery (again), no real keys, no extendable memory, still a closed environment, no camera!!!, etc. And yes, they are all shortcomings.

But my mum will be delighted. She doesn’t even want to know what USB is. the doctors running around in hospitals, using the iPad for documentation will not care about battery life, the sales forces don’t care about the keys and so on and so on.

The content providers will be more happy about the new revenue stream provided by the new marketing channels than they will be unhappy of the camera being added in v 2.0 of the iPad and concurrency in OS 4.0.

And guess what, all my geek colleagues will love to surf, watch movies on the couch, chips and beer on the side, an iPad in their hands in just some months.

The iPad will be Apples biggest success ever, whatever its current limitations are, because it defines several completely new markets and revenue streams.

(From an agile perspective: We always drive business to be content with a very minimal product to enter the markets, learn on the market and only add the features that are absolutely necessary to drive demand. It seems that many, as customers, do not like what the preach as those crafting the products ;-)

Where have I been?

Oh my, I don't actually know what happened.
Yeah, you know - if you watched, which I wouldn't expect from after having been neglected for a loooong long time: Nothing happened :-(
I guess, the reasons for not updating this blog were manyfold:

• I have a new role at my job, which meant quite a change and distraction from things that happen here
• I was busy writing articles, reviewing articles and books, working on talks on conferences (see my - ummm - last post - and even that post is soooo mid 2010 that it does not reflect where have really been. Excuses, excuses - bla bla bla and so on.
• I was not satisfied with the format of this blog and am looking for a new template (might even switch to WordPress). Just look at this small writing - disgusting. I still like the picture and stuff, though.

But guess what, I am in a fresh mode now and have collected a couple of topics I want to write about in the next weeks:

• My conference year (as a visitor)
• My year as a speaker
• My reading year (fiction and non-fiction)
• My learning year
• What is my focus for improvement at work
• A posting on 'The 4 hour body' by Tim Ferris and my application of it
• My summary of my kindle experiences and what I want to make of it
• On paranoia driven development
• What do I see in Lean: A summary
• Things I don't understand, like: making simple things really complicated (or the other way around, or: Behavioral patterns in the agile coaching community
• My new model of queue management on several layers - duuuh!

Well, even thinking of it is lots of fun for me ;)

See you soon, right here.

Appeareances

Just a quick update on my next talks:


1) Seacon 2010, HH, June 28

Pecha Kucha "The Why and How of Kanban"

2) it-agile, Munich, July 2, Opening Unconference
Pecha Kucha "Unsere reise ins agile Land"

3) Lean, Agile & Scrum, Zurich, September 7

"Enterprise Kanban at mobile.de", Session 45 minutes, together w/ Stefan Roock

I am quite proud on this one: Second time I'm talking in the context of the Poppendieck's, Henrik Knieberg is there and it's a very small and very high quality conference.

4) Lean & Kanban 2010, Antwerp, September 23 - 24

"Enterprise Kanban at mobile.de" 

I am  - again - very proud to be part of this, have a look at the program: David Anderson (unfortunately in parallel to me, Al Shalloway, John Seddon, again the Poppendiecks, Karl Scotland etc - blush!)

Additionally, I am currently submitting talks for:
LESS 2010, October 17-20, Helsinki, Finland
XP-Days Germany 2010 (one on my own, one with Roman Pichler, one with Bernd Schiffer)
OOP 2011 (as above)

Lean Pasta Manufacturing - at Famiglia Martelli in Lari (Toscana)

This time I want to talk a little about pasta. And how to produce pasta in a lean way. But in a very personal, traditional and - yes - strange way too.

Actually about one month ago, we wanted to have a family vacation on Sardinia. But Eyjafjallajökull , that in the beginning seemed to be a bad joke we wouldn't have to fear, after some time became a real threat and finally the killer to that plan. So instead we improvised for Tuscany.  Out of several coincidences we ended up in the small and beautiful village of Lari.


Größere Kartenansicht

In Lari, we lived at a beautiful agriculture that I can only recommend: Il Frutetto, a quiet, peaceful place where Fabio and Tatiana produce exquisite olive oil and some wine. They can not sell too much of it to each family though, as they have only little capacities which need to last for the full year. We are sad already that we do not have too much of the wine left. Olive oil will last for another 6 months, but then what ...?

Anyway, the Frutetto brought me closer to the very traditional craftsmanship of the whole of Tuscany. You do not see a lot of supermarkets there and although it is obviously getting harder to withstand the market pressure of large chains and brands, the Tuscany has impressively held up small stores, small agricultures etc. It is a total different quality of living: You know where the meet, the cheese, the fruits come from - if you want to. And you can taste that!

Soon we were invited to visit the pasta manufactory of the Martelli family in Lari. And now I am getting closer to the point: Following the Tuscany tradition, this family has business objectives that completely differ from anything I have seen and experienced in any of the companies I have yet worked: This business does not want to grow. Rather than that, they want to stand out for all times as the best pasta makers delivering the highest quality ready made pasta available. They don't even want to get that much more efficient until now, as the whole staff consists of family members. (Who knows, maybe one day they get tired of doing that and they will have external staff and everything changes. But to this day, the business feeds the two families of the brothers Martelli).

This leads to interesting effects, as at all the places I have seen lean efforts, it was about savings and lead time optimizations etc. So lean was completely driven by getting faster and quicker and lowering inventory as a proxy for savings by still having quality in place.

The (not so) secret behind the Martelli pasta (and the business model) is that the pasta is produced very slowly on a ca. 50 years old machine and then veery slowly dried at a certain temperature (it is terribly hot in there). So with your whole product drying for 50 hours come to me and talk about reducing WiP!

Another secret ingredient is that the pasta is relatively rough, thus better taking up any sauce that comes with it - this is a feature that is especially liked by the Maitre's of the world as it helps amplify any subtle touch of your sauce.

The Martelli's only sell their pasta in 1 kg packets rather than in 500gr. I forgot the number, but it goes along the line of: What the Martelli's produce in one day, Barilla produces in 5 minutes (whatever).

I guarantee to you that there is no obvious optimization that came to my mind when I looked at the production place. Any further optimization would have compromized the quality and thus the business concept of the Martelli's. Any stupid excel geek would tell them: Let the machines run faster, only dry your pasta for 20 hours and is still good enough. But no, the Martelli's don't buy that. They rather keep their process and win one pasta "championship" after the other and are one of the most sought after pastas of the world.

I hope this will go on for a long time. Why this so interesting to me is because the business goals are so different. And this leads to an example which makes Don Reinertsen's approach to PD much clearer to me, again: There are no rules and no lean rules. There are several dimensions to look at your problem and domain and then come up with the suitable solution rather than a recipe: Large WiP must not be bad or waste - here it even is your secret ingredient for quality.

But again: Don't use this exception as an excuse for your "unnecessary" WiP! This is different to most environments but again: It explains that you have to take a closer look beyond the "common" rules - they might not always fit you.

I can only recommend to have a look at Don Reinertsen's (minboggling!) talk on some common fallacies which goes by the great title of "The easy road to FLOW goes through a town called LEAN".

Have fun!

P.S.: Oh, I forgot to mention why the business model works: The price of the pasta has increased from 0,80 EUR to 3,30 EUR in about 10 years. And that's if you buy in Lari. if you buy anywhere else, the pasta is sold at prices up to more than 10,00 EUR. The quality does pay off - if you do not plan to grow!

Roman Pichler's new book on agile Product Management

Roman Pichler published a small but brilliant practical book focusing on agile Product Management with Scrum. Of course, it is focusing on the Product Owner's tasks. This is a welcome counter weight to the predominant developer and Scrum Master focused literature out there on the Scrum market.

Instead of reviewing it and repeating myself here, I simply link to the amazon product pages including my reviews in German and English.

There are lots of books out there where the author just offers a looong list of options, still leaving a confused reader. Not so with this book.

It really is a small, focused and focused book worth every cent. There is another good book out there on product management, which I find to be too general. If you are living in an agile environment, this is your choice!

Apples Constraint Based Product Politics leads to money going to small guys

Actually, I can not understand the whirl around Apples current product politics. Edit: In fact, the way it turns out right now, I think it's more stupidly following the techie vs. business blueprint of "I wanna play" vs.  "I wanna make money" (where in this case the latter can be seen as "I wanna define my product strategy based on a unique usability concept (which some may like but others not) but which is my USP and I'm gonna defend that USP"). Interesting enough most ramblings I see from the tech community are not concerned at all with that USP (which belongs to Apple btw) but with their very own personal freedom of choice of their beloved tools. There are even completely ridiculous comparisons on that, e.g have a look at the following blog ran with a certain twitter fame, calles "Steve Jobs has just gone mad" (but respect due for the great title of the posting):


"Developers are not free to use any tools to help them. If there is some tool that converts some Pascal or, Ruby, or Java into Objective-C it is out of bounds, because then the code is not "originally" written in C. This is akin to telling people what kind of desk people sit at when they write software for the iPhone. Or perhaps what kind of music they listen to. Or what kind of clothes they should be wearing. This is *INSANE*."


Well, there's many things to say about this humble passage. First of all, let's say Apple will really be so strict and enforce this rule (they will sure do that against the flash write once run everywhere thing). What's wrong with that? You don't like it - you don't develop for their platform but for - let's say - Android, because that's just so open as you like it to be, except there's no serious working way do develop a cool application besides Java. But ok, that's not a lock on paper :-) If you think Android is much more open than that, just look at what developer.android.com has to say. It's all about java. No complaint to be heard.


Then again, Apple chooses to define a platform supported by them to support their own product with their very own USP which is so unique that is alone ensures them their margins. So, to me it makes sense that they cover and protect the business and the (tremendous) investments they made on the platform to be sure that the platform just stays what it is. High quality, high usability, unique etc. And of course they are doing everything that is undermining the uniqueness of that platform, e.g. the Adobe write once run everywhere attitude which is, of course, out of a completely different business model the complete opposite of what Apple wants on their platform.


But the most hilarious part is when this all is compared to telling a developer on which desk to sit (heh?), what music to hear (OMG), or what to wear? My goodness, Apple being strict in defining it's product platform is like telling me what music to hear? This is so far off, that this comparison alone could be  disqualifying everything else. (Even if I like Tim O'Reilly's idea and open letter that Apple should come back to the former mode of open communication and involvement in the community.


But the main point: Why should anyone be in a position to tell Apple what is best for their product? 
At least, there are some sportsman out there. I really liked this posting regarding hacking the devices! 
To me it seems, Apple is applying constraints to realize the following properties for applications on it's mobile devices:

• Great Usability
• Same Usability patterns across all applications
• A certain quality
• Performance

So, the overarching goal is to achieve a unified, seemless and good usability and performance across all possible applications on their platform.


You may share those objectives or not. But if you share them you have to be honest in admitting that this is the major selling point for these devices for the masses. (Thats why my wife likes those devices, that's why I even dare to think of my mother using an iPad). More than that, this product philosophy (again: like it or not) leads to certain people buying other Apple products after getting hooked on an iPhone. Like lots of people bought MacBooks after having the first real good mp3-player experience in their life with any product from the iPod family.


It's easy to see that such a well defined and user centered product philosophy pays of well for apple. And it doesn't because they want to do evil. It does because people are happy with the devices they buy. Which should be one major target for any product company. Are you happy with your Dell? You may not kill yourself over it, but: Are you happy? I myself die a little death each and every day I have to open my Dell which is provided by my employer!


I can very well understand why Apple is banning Flash from the iPhone. If you don't understand, visit me and listen to the fan of my 3 1/2 yr. old MacBook whenever I open a site with flash on any modern browser. It's killing me. It's killing me for each small little animation where I think - good god, why did they need to use flash for that little silly thing. Is it appropriate to shoot with flash when all you want is some glue to quickly hack some nifty little gadgets together? For simply showing a video? Edit: So - yes  - basically one has to say that Adobe screwed itself.


I can also understand that Apple is limiting the way how applications are developed for these platforms with their limitations, because they worked hard on constraining the developer tools to be able to develop something with high quality for the platform. And this is actually the art that was performed in developing the mobile platforms of Apple - to create so much power on these little devices by bringing up so many possibilities but also lots of perfect little constraints so that the developer can not kill the good experience on that platform.


So, what Adobe and other platforms are planning with their write once run everywhere philosophy is quite the contrary: No matter what your device looks like and what constraints i has - just develop one application. Why should Apple, given their product philosophy, be so stupid and allow such a thing? (Especially in the case of Adobe which couldn't have cared less in the last ten years to support apples wishes and bug and performance reports).


And don't forget - everybody can go and grab a phone nearly as or even more powerful like the google Nexus One, which is more open (although some doubt that) but not as nice in it's UI and not as aligned across the offered applications. And yes, you can change the UI whatever way you like.


What I want to say is: If you love the Apples mobile platforms work, you need to understand that they work this way because Apple protects exactly this platform in this way. If you don't like it - buy another product. Which is completely fine. But you will not get the experience of the iPhone on such a small, weak mobile device by being open. (I tried it - i installed so many free programs on my jailbroken iPhone I got sick of them. They destroy the fun of the iPhone.)


And remember: You develop any way you want on the powerful Notebook and desktop platforms of Apple.


What's more and what seems a little forgotten is that I do not see any mobile platform out there with such a lot of programs. I simply do not know of any platform out there with such variety and diversity in depth as well as in width. Whenever I was looking for an application for a certain purpose I found it. Mostly I had the coice of several free apps vs. some offered for purchase (mostly even the free ones winning).  So, in effect the iPad and the iPhone are not closed regarding purpose of the applications but the way they are developed. As John Gruber put it: Every halfway gifted 13 year old can get his app on the iPhone. In fact the much debated effective distribution channel over the iTunes AppStore has led to a very strange effect that effectively those who are making real money with iPhone apps are only very few large corporations but mostly individual developers and very small companies. Think of Tweetdeck, Things, etc. And even if the app bears the name of a big company, the market is so young that have not insourced that skillset yet. If you look closely, the so called closed system has led to individuals making the dollars rather than enterprises. Actually, I like that.


Edit: What I would really like apple to do is open the AppStore to all the crap that is supposed to be running on the device. Just open the gates. Let any mediocre flash implementation get on the iPhone on any OS update (but just for me: I want to be able to opt in first, 'cause I won't). And then activate flash and look on the responsiveness of your phone and on the battery. Yes, that's what's gonna happen ... it will be unusable (remember the processor is weak, the battery small etc.) So, if you think about that before, why not simply remove that trash from the iPone in the first place? (Like Apple did.)


Edit: Stanislav Datskovskiy published a briliant blog post from a quite different angle, hinting on the non-apples letting this happen out of sheer dumbness. Nice excerpt: "... For the Apple-imitators to turn into genuine “Apples” would be as fantastic and unlikely as it would be for a slime mold to spontaneously become a true multicellular animal, equipped with a central nervous system.  It is also unclear that, from their own perspective, they should want to grow brains – for a creature with that kind of centralized point of failure is decidedly no longer immortal ... " Haha.