Bio: Dr. Klaus Leopold is a Kanban pioneer and worldwide one of the most experienced and successful lean and agile experts for knowledge work. He provides consulting for global companies on implementing Flight Levels and Kanban, the change processes associated with these and optimizing their value creation.

Abstract: In this talk, I discuss an agile transition where approximately 600 people were involved. The goal was to shorten the time-to-market for initiatives to be able to respond to customer needs more quickly and, as such, improve business agility. In order to achieve this, a reorganization was carried out. Cross-functional teams were constructed so knowledge needed for development is fully available within the team. In addition, the teams were categorized according to product in order to remove any dependencies. Visualization of the work, Standup meetings and Retrospectives made the agile transition complete—except for the expected improvements. In this session, I share what we did to improve the situation and reach the goal of “more business agility”. I also show how you can approach an agile transition of this size, so you can avoid the issue of no improvements being seen. This much I can tell you in advance: do not start at the team level—it will save not only your nerves, but also a lot of money!

For a limited time, grab Klaus Leopold’s Practical Kanban book at Leanpub for a discounted price for the LeanAgileCAN Network. You can use the link below, and/or use the coupon LeanAgileCAN when purchasing the book.

https://leanpub.com/practicalkanban/c/LeanAgileCAN

Business agility is more than the organization’s IT shop adopting an agile delivery method. Business agility depends on three core capabilities: rapid delivery, strategic sensing, and customer rapport. As such it builds resilience to change as a strategic imperative and eventually it allows businesses to build a strategic advantage in driving change.

Investments in “agile” from an IT perspective will not increase business agility. So what does a company need in order to successfully drive change rather than react to it?

Dave will talk about how creating a resilient organization starts with rapid delivery and why many major organizations are turning their attention to less costly on-demand releases. We’ll look at how customer rapport is the new driver of operational efficiency, where not building something is invariably cheaper than optimizing the operational cost of building anything at all.