4 Reasons for Doing Anything (and why you should attend Building the Lean Web Development Team)

I recently read somewhere that there are only four kinds of reasons that persuade anybody to do anything. Since I sincerely think that anybody who has anything to do with web development should DO MY COURSE - Building the Lean Web Development Team, I thought I'd try all four of them.

Everybody is Doing this Course

Well, actually they're doing similar courses. Almost everybody involved with software development is now taking a look at Lean and Kanban. If you do this course, you'll be joining hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people worldwide who are realising that the approach of the Toyota Motor Company has something to teach them about their own business. But Shhh. Don't tell everybody this. Hang on a minute, what am I saying do tell everybody this. It's really important: Web development is different from making cars. Lots of people are talking about Lean and Kanban getting in consultants and going on courses, but they're trying to take what worked for making cars and clumsily attach it with staples and masking tape to the rather different process of software development. The differences between traditional software development and web development are mere details: kinds of details that Toyota's process guru Taiichi Ohno made a world-beating company by paying attention to.

Nobody is Doing this Course

If you do this course, you'll be in an elite minority. You'll be a rebel, a revolutionary, a true visionary. Almost nobody else is actually taking the principles that Taiichi Ohno used to develop the world's biggest car company and using them to actually understand and radically change the way people do web development. What most people are trying to do is to modify the practices which is, to be frank, just a little bit crazy. If you do this course, you won't just be giving your company a head start, because most companies will never be able to see web development this way. This course will teach you to look at your web development team in a way that will allow you to massively improve the effectiveness of what you do.

If you don't DO THIS COURSE Bad things will happen

If you don't do this course, or apply the kind of the ideas that we deal with in this course, bad things will happen to your Web development team. Quite simply, you will be overtaken by the web development companies and teams that do start to shape the way they work by the unique nature of web development problems. You won't be able to compete with these teams in terms of quality, cost or speed of turnaround. You know what's even worse? Evidence from what happened in the car industry is that even when things are utterly disastrous, you won't be able to see the problem.

If you do DO THIS COURSE Good things will happen

Lean web development is about learning to see web development for what it really is. Once you start to understand that "project management" is not a set of rules which you can learn on a course, but an attitude, once you decide to shape your team so that it is continually changing to match the shape of the problems that you have to solve, things get better. Once you start to understand concepts that are particularly pertinent to web development and not particularly pertinent to car manufacture, such as the difference between value demand and failure demand, you are in a position to give your customer what they want and to make money doing it.

Money, Money, Money

Number 5 of the 4 reasons why anybody does anything. I'm not that big a fan of using money as a way of motivating people but... Once you understand what the value is that you're delivering to your customer, you can work on getting that value to flow through your team really fast. The more value the work you do has to your customers, the more they'll want from you, the more they'll pay you.

Money Back

I'm so convinced that this course is going to help you build a better, more effective, web development team that makes you lots and lots of money that I'm offering a money back guarantee - if you come on this course and you don't feel that it's delivered what it promised, I'll give you your money back. No arguments. No hassles, no questions asked.

Money for Free

If you don't think this course is right for you, but you know somebody who it would suit to a tee. Tell them to mention your name when they book the place and I'll give you a 10% affiliates fee.


For further information, contact mark.stringer@gmail.com (07736 807 604)

Building the Lean Web Development Team - 27th November central London

This course will be run at The Hatton

This course is the v1.0 of the beta course that I ran in Bristol 6 weeks ago.  Improved as a result of the great feedback that I got from that course.


Waste

This is the focus of a lot of discussions about Lean, but it's not the focus of this course. The focus is on:
* understanding what it is that you do
* which bits of that are actually of value to your customer
* how can you let them flow through your organisation quicker and more smoothly
* how can you stop yourself doing the things that don't add value

Value Stream Mapping

One way of looking at a business is an entity that creates value. A very simple scheme for reducing waste is to map what the value is that you're providing to your customers and then doing what you can to reduce, or completely eliminate any other activities which do not provide value to the customers.

Another way of improving the value stream is to make sure that value work flows steadily through the organisation with value being added at each stage. Through mapping the stream we can see how it can be reconfigured so that value added at one stage flow directly into the next stage where value is added.

With web development teams, my experience is that there can be problems here with flow of value into and out of the development team, there can be also problems with the timing of adding in design elements and content elements that are not independent from software functionality.

Flow

A central concept in the Toyota Production system is that work is carried out most efficiently if it flows through the team. It follows that this can't be done if every part of the process is running at 100% because, inevitable, the capacity of some parts of the chain will have higher capacity and some other parts of the chain will have lower capacity. The very first thing to do to improve flow through a team is to look at points along the production chain where work is building up.

In web development, this point is often testing. There are several ways of reducing this bottle neck:

* training up the whole team so that they can work in testing when there is work building up there.
* Abandoning testing as a separate function all together and relying on a comprehensive approach to Test Driven Development
* Pulling work through the system only at the rate that the lowest capacity section of the chain can deal with.
* Reducing the workload for the most experienced team members and using their extra capacity to improve the skills of less-experienced team members.


Kanban

I'm reluctant to use Japanese words when talking about Lean - as you see I've used very few - because one of my rules is that "Agile is not a license to speak Elvish or Klingon". Kanban simply ways of signalling what work needs doing and also of communicating to the team how they are performing.

Kanban is the system of signals that create flow of value through a team. One way of using a Kanban system is to create "pull" through the team so that work is only initiated when there is capacity further down the stream for it to be dealt with.

Continual Re-skilling

The rate at which required web-related skills change is extremely fast. In my experience with "old fashioned" software development there was a tendency for management to actually try to prevent its staff for from re-skilling (e.g. so that they would be available to work on COBOL projects, ADA projects, I've done them both). Now this would be an extremely dangerous thing to do - for both management and employees.

At the same time, the depth and variety of skills required means that it is very difficult for employees to acquire these skills "in their own time". One of the challenges of applying Lean to Web development is to figure out how to include continual improvement in the skills of the team into the web development process. It may be that this involves allowing some team members to work at less than full capacity (as the requirement for even flow through the process might dictate anyway) and expecting that the team members fill this time with re-skilling activities.

What is it?

One way of thinking about Taiichi Ohno - the inventor of the Toyota Production System - is that he was someone who really knew what a car factory was, what it was supposed to do, and how to make it do those things better. I'm not sure anybody knows what a web development team is (if there's only one kind of thing), what it's supposed to do, and how to make it better. I think this is really good news in some sense because people who can work this stuff out will be in a very competitive position - as are Toyota.

One of the areas we discussed here was that everybody I talked to in web development either doesn't know which bits make money, or knows that it is the bits other than bespoke web development.

Structure of "Building the Lean Web Development Team"

Session 1

Run through Lean Concepts

* Brief History of Lean and the Toyota Production System
* Value Streams, Waste and Flow
* How does Lean relate to web development

Session 2

Approaches to identifying the Value stream

Value stream mapping exercise

Session 3

Benefits of Flow

Flow and Kanban exercise

Mistake-Proofing and Poka Yoke

Session 4

What is it?

Open discussion

* Possible problems with adoption
* identification of next steps


For further information, contact mark.stringer@gmail.com (07736 807 604)

Agile Training

Agile Training Course in Central London
Thursday May 28th at the University of Westminster.

We're running our most successful and popular course - Introduction to Agile Methods - for a second time in conjunction with NMK at the University of Westminster.

For further information email mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)

Introduction to Agile Training Course in Central London

We will be running our "Introduction to Agile Methods" one-day training course in Central London on Tuesday 3rd March 2009. The course will be run in conjunction with New Media Knowledge (NMK).

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604) or Matt@agilelab.co.uk (07713 634 830)

Agile Lab now offering three courses in conjuction with 01ZeroOne and NMK

Agile Lab is now offering three courses in central London at 01zero-one and in conjunction with NMK New Media Knowledge. The three courses are Introduction to Agile, Agile Methods for Managers and Technical Aspects of Agile - as detailed here in the course flyer.

Agile Lab to Run a Training Course at the London Games Festival

Agile Lab are going to be running an Introduction to Agile course at the London Games Festival in London in October 2008. This will be in conjunction with 01ZeroOne. More details to follow, nearer the time.

Agile Training in Central London

Introduction to Agile Training in Central London, Wednesday 2nd July 2008

After the success of the course that we ran in March, we are running another training course in central London on Wednesday 2nd July 2008 in association with 01Zero-One. This is the popular and previously well-received course "Crawl Before You Leap".

The course is suitable for anyone who wants to get an introduction to Agile methods and who wants to get a hands-on feel for how it feels to work in an Agile fashion. No programming knowledge is required.

Agile Lab Courses

Scheduled Training Courses

Date	Title	Location	Fee	Contact
Wednesday 20th January 2010	Building the Lean Web Development Team	The Hatton, Central London	£350	Email mark.stringer@gmail.com or phone 07736 807 604 (book online)