So, I am working through my backlog of webcasts (Ha, ha, I made a funny…see there’s this notion of a backlog and….oh never mind), which includes the content produced from the Kaizen/Echo Chamber Conf event this past November in Austin (at least for the non-cowards who didn’t password protect theirs), and one of the sets I watched today was a high-level overview of Lean/Kanban led by David Laribee.
Depending on how versed the viewer is already, the value you can derive (Ha, ha, I made a fu…never mind) from the videos (3 of them) of the session may vary, but I found the visual presentation of the concepts to be, well, valuable in getting a high-level overview.
Now, there is a *hell* of a lot of jargon involved (“We produced a Kaizen event….Oh, I’m so sorry, is there a prescription for that?”), and if that’s the sort of thing that will bother you, then you may be bothered by some of it (depending in part on how you feel about white boys using Japanese terms). Since part of my dissertation involved an analysis of parts of Heidegger’s Being and Time, arguably the most jargon-heavy (and some would say, incoherent) philosophical works of all time, that doesn’t necessarily bother me so much. Learning the terminology allows one to converse more efficiently. Plus, Dave has a way of defining ‘way tasty’ (I think that is what it was) that is funny yet insightful.
It’s worth a view, in my opinion. A couple of other links came up in the videos, so I’ll list them here:
Kanban Yahoo Group: remember folks, if you want to learn without looking foolish, there’s nothing wrong with lurking an active discussion group.
Lean Software Engineering: a site with a lot of essays involving, well, lean software engineering.
Rolling Wave Project Planning: a white paper about a different way of project planning.
And of course, Google is your friend. And more obviously, if you want to learn more about Lean, find someone who has practiced it.