Currently I am attending a BestBrains course with Mary and Tom Poppendieck on Lean Software Development (see more here).

On the course there are people from companies in UK, Germany and Denmark, it is an interesting combination of different views and experience.
Even though I read the two books from Poppendeick many years ago, it has been an inspiring day with many stories and cases from companies around the world.

We did two Value Stream Maps based on some real life cases from the participants, and the people presenting the results had a hard time when Mary started to ask a lot of “why”-questions. I am sure they got a lot of valuable things to work with at home.

Some of the take-away I got from the first day:

• Focus on bad news first: That makes the organization focus on constant improvements (Toyota does it).
• Copying Toyota is also copying someone else solutions to their problems and that is not solutions to your own problems. Lean from Toyota and improve it.
• To make real user value, you have to see and understand it from eyes of the customer/users.

Especially the last bullet is so important, and if you want to learn more in this area, I can recommend a BestBrains workshop at Øresund Agile on May 14th: “Capturing Requirements and Agile Planning“ http://oresundagile.org/workshop-7. It might change how you define your systems to be built in the future...

By Mads Troels Hansen