The day was April, 24th, 2010. The place a restaurant at the Lenoux Mall in Atlanta. The event, an special speaker lunch attended by a meaningful representation of the Lean/Kanban community. On this space/time reference, I had the most important experience of my professional life ever: It was officially announced that I have won one of the inaugural Brickell Key Awards for my recent work in applying Lean/Kanban techniques to design a technical/operational environment regarding the service-oriented business that I own in Brazil, a company called Phidelis. The award itself should be enough to remove the floor below me. But, in addition, it was given to me in a special event illuminated by a ra... [More]

That was the title of my presentation last Thursday at Agiles 2009, 2nd Latin-American conference on Agile Development Methodologies. I have designed this presentation trying to summarize what the Kanban community is trying to spread recently as a new way to manage knowledge work. Download the slides here to follow this post about the presentationBy the way, knowledge work was the first topic of the presentation. The initial discussion was about how software development fits with knowledge work (slide #1) and how such activities can be associated with a huge quantity of variations in scenarios and contexts (slides #3 to #6). Understanding the nature of knowledge... [More]

Last saturday I was at Agile Brazil 2009 conference. It was a great one-day conference with a lot of influential brazilian Agile thought leaders and practitioners talking about Agile. Interesting how Rio de Janeiro offers an audience with high mature levels of knowledge to discuss and argue about software development. It's definitely a great place to host national and international conferences about Agile.It's also interesting to watch Lean and Kanban become so controversial in the Agile world. I can classify the Agile Communitty impressions about the "Flow Paradigm" in four categories:1) People that believe in this paradigm as the only alternative for their proje... [More]

I always looked at risk management activities using the event-driven risk approach offered by the current project management traditions.Perhaps because of this, I've never paid so much attention on this topic before, as I am doing now. Flying back to Brazil from the conference in Miami, I had the opportunity to read the amazing piece of text that David Anderson wrote about Risk Management on the proceeding book of the conference. After that, I've started to think about risks in a different dimension. Now, I’m diving on this conclusion:Mutual Trust Relationships can be sustained by intrinsic risk management mechanisms.There is definitely something more in dea... [More]

Last week I was in Miami attending the Lean and Kanban conference. This post contains my personal view about the conference and about some hot topics that gain my attention while I was there.   Between Sessions on the 2nd day Structuring the community  The announcement of the new Lean Software and Systems Consortium makes me think about how important is to take this community to a next level in terms of organization. I have this perception that the Lean community is fragmented today in a couple of different trends. It would be cool if this Consortium could be a real representation of the whole Lean community. But I really don´t know if it is goin... [More]

Less than two months left to the Lean and Kanban Conference in Miami and some exciting news have just happened last days.The price is lower now and there are options for choosing between a "Full Lean Day", a "Full Kanban Day" or both. Look at the final version of the promotional flyer and open the conference web site to read more: Using David Anderson's words: "the greatest ever assembled group of experts in Lean software development will be convening in Miami in May to explore the frontiers of agile and lean in software development". He is talking about: Alan Shalloway, Dean Leffingwell, Peter Middleton, James Sutton, Core... [More]

 One of the central elements of Kanban is the ability that you acquire in redesigning continuously your process as you understand how things work in your scenario. In fact, understanding what we do was the first benefit that we got after starting to work with this approach about a year ago. Insofar as we have got this comprehension, we realize that there was something special about how we have been signalizing the elements of our process. As these signals become more meaningful, more stable and predictable becomes our process.Figure 1 shows what we call "The System View". That is the main view of the process and it is the most frequently used view by all team me... [More]

Have you ever thought about using twitter to improve communication with your team?I have been tweeting since early this month and definetely couldn't stop anymore.You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/alissonvaleWhen I realized the great concept behind the tool (quick, open and uncomprimising communication), I decided to put our team to try it.The results after some weeks was awesome. Now we use the tool intesively all day long.The ability to broadcast information througth the team is powerful. You can use to simple messages like "The server x was updated.",  to give advices for co-workers like "be carefull with Visual Studio when you do this"... [More]

What strategies, principles, and methods can be leveraged to optimally match supply and demand over time? [More]

This week an interview where I answer some question about Kanban and Lean was published on InfoQ Portal.Check it out here:  http://www.infoq.com/br/news/2009/01/brasil-representacao-conferenciaCongratulations to Manoel Pimentel (Chief Editor of Brazilian InfoQ website) who has this iniciative to spread this work that we are trying to bring to Brazil.There are a lot of space today to apply Lean ideas in software development, including in niches where is still difficult to stick the new Agile paradigm. Reading the interview maybe you can realize how to apply this model to common scenarios in our area. Good reading and any feedback will be welcome.