Next week, our @LitheSpeed team heads to the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. For older salts like myself, it’s gratifying to see the intense excitement in this new movement around this idea of combining Lean and Agile, and applying it to product development. At LitheSpeed, we’ve long been proponents of combining Lean and Agile:
1. Evolving the Agile Model with Lean. Some years ago, we encouraged the Agile community to Go Lean. Thanks to David Anderson, Alan Shalloway and others, this has happened in a big way with the rise of Kanban and the Lean Systems and Software Consortium.
2. Lean Portfolio Management. We’ve had much success with scaling agile methods through the use of Lean methods. Here’s a link to an issue I guest edited for the Cutter Consortium on using Lean Portfolio Management to scale Agile methods.
3. The Lean-Agile PMO. Many within the Project Management Institute (PMI) have appreciated and internalized the Lean-Agile PMO concepts we’ve practiced and promoted over the years.
4. Timeless Lean Management. We’ve held that agile management simply implements many timeless Lean Management principles.
Now, all in all, it’s awesome to see a new generation of practitioners get excited about applying Lean— this time to product development. We’ve been applying many of the Lean Startup techniques on our Agile Retrospectives product Sensei (from the Lean “Master” or “Coach”), and hope to learn a lot at the conference.
With Lean Startup leaders like Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, along with Arin Sime from our own LitheSpeed network, the conference should be a blast!
So who’s going to be there?
