Lean Enterprise Software and Systems 2012 in Tallinn

Just got back from the Lean Enterprise Software and Systems conference. This was my first time at LESS. I expected to meet old friends and make new ones and attend interesting sessions over the three days.

This year the venue was in Tallinn, Estonia. Euroopa Hotel had quite nice facilities for the conference and LESS organizer Agile Estonia had negotiated a good rate for the LESS attendees for accommodation. The hotel is located at the very busy port of Tallinn where several 2000+ capacity ferries shuttle between Tallinn and Helsinki. I managed to manoeuvre myself into the Viking XPRS boat in order to catch the Agile Finland team and discuss their expectations and get into the LESS2012 mood.

Day One

The conference started with Jurgen Appelo's talk about Why Melly Hates Her Job. Having seen that couple of weeks earlier at Topconf I stayed just long enough to notice what kind of difference the size of the room makes in the presentation. Jurgen was energized as usual but somehow his energy was not sufficient to fill up the room. At Topconf the room was probably too small for his session but it was full of energy and good flow. Same content, same delivery and totally different feeling.

First actual session I participated in was Agile Management Innovations – Change at Organizational Level session by Bernd Schiffer and Christian Dähn. They had nice collection of practises that the management can take up one by one and be on their merry road towards Lean Business. I quite like the idea and will definitely use that with clients, especially where adopting Scrum is seen as too big of a first step. This framework goes beyond Scrum with several practises so it can be used to expand the Lean ideas and ways of working after the Scrum teams are fully in orbit. Check out their site about more details on AMIs. 

After the AMI session I jumped to the Beyond Budgeting track and went to see Peter Bunce on the Beyond Budgeting Principles. I had read something from the BeyongBudgetingRoundtable site but that did not fully prepare me to what was coming there. Beyond Budgeting is to businesses what Scrum is for software development. A holistic framework that can be used to transform how companies do business. I am still in the early stages in my journey for fully grasping BB but I am going to read some more and chat with people how to actually go about realising it. I spend rest of the day in the Beyond Budgeting track hearing real life stories from different organizations such as Statoil, Jernia (Norwegian hardware store chain) and Össur (maker of fine prosthetics). Jernia had made the transformation to use Beyond Budgeting but was now reverting back to command-control mode due to changes in the management team. Their situation sounded quite dire. I was actually shocked to learn that they did not have common information systems where they could see what was going on. No wonder the management felt that they needed to have better visibility through traditional management lines. 

Day 1 was ended by Christopher Avery's fantastic keynote which I hereby rename to "LayBlame is not a village in France".

Day Two

Day two started with some hits and some misses. I missed Esko Kilpi's keynote in the morning and dived into Ken Power's talk about Value Stream Manager. What a novel concept and in my mind a perfect fit for manager(s) who are wondering what their role might be after the some level of Lean Transformation has taken place. Value Stream Manager looks at the value generation holistically from the idea generation to delivery of finished product or service to the customer and pre-empts getting potential or actual impediments removed so that value stream flow uninterrupted. I will look further into this as well.

Couple of misses after Ken's session but then came the highlight of my second day. Özlem Yüze was giving a great session about how Maersk had adopted Agile Systems Development in their organization. Fantastic story, well told and showed how big a job it is to keep things in orbit even if you initially get stuff rolling. I got (again) an inspiration to write something at the University again. I will keep you posted how that process takes flight (again).

Day two ended with Jason Little's session on how Lean Startup can be utilized also outside of the startup context. Good stuff there as well which I need to revisit after I finish the Lean Startup book.

Even though the LESS2012 setup was quite compact there were so many topics of interest that I have to read about some of the concepts some more before I can make any conclusions on them.

Day Three

Day three was just a half a day with couple of workshops in the tracks. Dawna Jones had ad-hoc session combined with Stephen Haas on the Cultural Hacks and Behavioural Change. That really made my day and was less sorry that I missed Stephen's session on Tuesday. This goes deep into what kind of things in the environment you can affect thus affecting people's behaviour and thus creating a organizational change.

All in all the LESS2012 was so far the best Agile Conference I have attended and I am looking forward to LESS2013 already. Meanwhile I shall read more and more importantly apply some of the learning with my clients in the near future.