A few weeks ago I flew to Canada to deliver presentations in Calgary and Toronto. This time it was for joint presentations with Kraig Parkinson, who works out of our Canada office. The nice folk at InfoQ were at the Toronto presentation to record it. You’ll find the video here: Lean Software Development Presentation.
If you watch it then I’d love to get your feedback…
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Hi Richard,
So far, it looks like one quick suggestion would be to put a consistent lighter background behind the text bubbles on some of the slides, such as the ones that have the flag backgrounds towards the beginning. The text on “any color, as long as it is black” was barely readable.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:46 pm
When Kraig starts his portion of the presentation, many of the slides have some overlay issues. It looks like the conversion for the InfoQ use had problems.
June 26th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Thanks Jonathon. I love those backgrounds - looks like they’ll have to go though.
June 28th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
You could just outline the text in a lighter color. Even a thin outline will give it enough contrast to make it readable.
July 11th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Hi Rich,
I thought the content was great, the comments on empowering people to make change (cemetary grounds-keeper) did very much resonnate.
My only slight negative is that it’s quite long at over an hour but a worthy topic, I’d like to pass it around my guys, hope that’s ok.
Alex
July 11th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Sure Alex - Thanks for your feedback. I do have a tendency to bang on : )
August 9th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Hi Richard,
Really interesting talk. I can see where many of the ideas in agile, XP and scrum come from. You have to admire organisations like Toyota that empower and respect their employees.
Good anecdotes and quotations - they often capture the ideas far better than lengthy books!
August 18th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Really interesting and engaging presentation (particularly enjoyed the anecdotes and stats about toyota). As a person who’s been involved primarily with up-front development models, I can think of tonnes of examples where the philosophies and techniques covered would have improved things in the organisations I’ve worked with. Certainly your points about building in quality, rather than inspecting for it, would shave some massive chunks off the development / testing effort (as well as a great deal of my own personal frustration). Your point at the end about architects being the ‘difficult sell’ also resonates.
To make a more general point about changing the way organisations operate, I think there is still a culture of resistance to the lean / agile models in organisations; particularly among project managers in large enterprise projects. There are still many, many managers who know only up-front development methodologies and rigorous change management processes - it is how they were trained and how they’ve always worked. It would be fantastic to start seeing more and more managers becoming aware of these philosophies, and taking the initiative to start implementing them.