Talks by topic

In today's dynamic business landscape, organizations face the constant need to adapt and evolve to stay ahead. Traditional change management approaches often fall short in addressing the complexities and uncertainties associated with continuous improvement.

At the core to any agile approach is the ability to manage for uncertainty. This is only possible through a process of continuous learning which requires active feedback loops. Linear approaches are doomed to fail in a world of uncertainty. Feedback incorporates new knowledge which enables learning. The key is maintaining healthy feedback loops which will enable success. An iterative approach with broken feedback loops is similarly doomed.

Many people think Kanban is just a project tracking board, whether it is stickies on the wall or in a tool like Trello or Jira. But Kanban is much more. And what does the Kanban Method mean to a Project Management Professional?

Enterprise projects are known to have challenges with uncertainty, risk, forecasting and commitment - and the most valuable projects often carry the most risk. Other industries also encounter risk and generate value by understanding and managing that risk effectively. Todd Little explores techniques used in a number of risky businesses - product development, oil and gas exploration, investment banking, medicine, weather forecasting, and gambling - and shares what those industries have done to manage uncertainty.

We are suffering from a horrible pandemic of epic proportion. Organizations throughout the globe are stricken by the contagions of transformationitis and the typical co-infection of reorganizationitis. Fortunately, these diseases are highly avoidable.

Leadership is a dance of stepping up to provide guidance and then stepping back to let the team deliver. This is easier said than done. As one of the co-authors of the book “Stand Back and Deliver,” Todd will demonstrate some of the tools that he has used to help with this leadership dance. These tools include:

Leaders today face constant, accelerating change driven by technology and incredibly high expectations from both internal and external customers. Surviving and thriving in this environment requires IT leaders who can reliably deliver the following:

Many development organizations have fully embraced agile development and there have been some great successes. But agility requires more than the development organization to be successful. Todd will share the message that he has delivered to business executives to help them better understand agile development, what it means for them, and what we ask of them so that we can all be successful.

Each year the Agile Executive Forum brings together executives responsible for large software portfolios to share their experiences with agile development. Todd summarizes what those executives are saying: why they adopted agile, the challenges they faced in scaling it across their organizations, and what they learned along the way.

In February 2011, ten years after the Agile Manifesto was written at Snowbird, a group gathered at the same place to reflect on what agile had achieved and to look into the future. Todd was part of a group that set out to "hunt elephants": the issues the agile community knew about but was not talking about.

Peter Senge’s Fifth Discipline does a great job of explaining Systems Thinking and the use of Causal Loops to describe system behavior. This presentation provides an overview of Systems Thinking and Causal Loops and goes into some of the common dynamics of software development

One of the biggest challenges for many organizations is that they have too many good ideas and are unable to fully staff all of them. A good strategy will act as a decision filter to help with portfolio prioritization. But too often strategies behave more like buckets than filters, and all new initiatives just get accumulated into the strategy bucket. This results in an overloaded portfolio that cannot be delivered resulting in frustration throughout the organization.

In this talk called "From Product Discovery to Product Delivery - A Real-Life Example", Todd will dive into the product journey of creating a new training class product called "Scrum Better with Kanban", developed by Kanban University and how they took it from the initial market assessment to the final product release. The talk will discuss the various factors that went into the product development process, including customer interviews, beta testing, and A/B testing. Todd will share his experience of conducting market research to identify the target audience and understand his needs and pain points. He will also discuss how customer interviews helped them refine the product idea and create a product that met customers' expectations. He will delve into the beta testing phase and how A/B testing was used to compare different features and determine which ones resonated with customers the most. Finally, He will share how the product was launched in the market and the lessons learned throughout the product development journey. Attendees can expect to gain insights into the product development process and learn about the importance of customer feedback in creating a successful product.

Todd Little presents a model of the software development process that can help managers and project team members improve their understanding of software development dynamics. The model consists of a set of functions and parameters that can easily be applied in a spreadsheet. Utilizing this model provides guidance for the software development organization to maximize value delivery by exploring value creation and value capture in the presence of uncertainty. Items that can be explored include project staffing, optimal release dates, and potential impacts of process improvements such as Pair Programming.

Offshore outsourcing is a popular approach for companies looking to reduce software development costs. We have found that the full picture of cost and value requires looking at efficiency, effectiveness, and risk. We provide a financial model and explore the so called hidden costs and risks of offshore outsourcing.

I often see teams struggle with aligning their development approaches with the market strategy of how their product is going to be successful in the marketplace. To be successful, a product must do something really well that solves a particular set of problems that customers are willing to pay for while at the same time it needs to solve other basic problems no worse than the competition. Product teams need to know where they are aiming to be “differentiating” and where they are aiming to be “good enough.” The Purpose Alignment Model developed by Niel Nickolaisen is a simple tool that can provide guidance to teams.

Yogi Berra is quoted as saying, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Effective management of a software portfolio is a challenge that many companies ignore, avoid or fail to follow through because it is too hard. Many approaches to portfolio management get so complex that decisions fail to get made. But what would “barely sufficient” portfolio management look like? In this hands-on tutorial we review some basic portfolio management guidelines and introduce a simulation game where participants make decisions about which investments a company makes.

We introduce the Purpose Alignment Model described in the book "Stand Back and Deliver" to demonstrate how to analyze portfolios, projects, functionality, and features based on company strategy. We will discuss the benefits this approach generates, the process for implementing this model, and work through several case studies. After developing a Purpose-Alignment Model for your project or company, you can significantly improve decision making and resource allocation (and make yourself look really good).

How often do we hear the familiar cries of frustration?

Many in the agile community suggest abandoning performance reviews, but few offer suggestions for alternatives. A large percentage of software developers work in an enterprise environment where performance reviews are mandated. What if you could do performance reviews that will honor agile values and not only suck less, but actually provide value to the individual and the organization? We have rolled out such a system successfully with strong support across the enterprise--from the individual colleagues, to people leaders, and even including HR. We will demonstrate the principles and the specific implementation of our system which you can tailor to your organization’s values and constraints.

A major challenge in agile development is the ability of test teams to keep pace with ongoing development while simultaneously ensuring that new development has not created regression failures. This case study from Halliburton shows how together with two globally distributed outsourcing partners they developed a comprehensive test automation strategy for their agile teams that effectively leveraged both in house and outsourced activities. This approach resulted in a significant quality improvement from prior releases.

Leaders today are faced with an incredible challenge—delivering the right results to changing marketplaces, doing more with limited resources, improving processes to reduce costs, opening new markets, and keeping the company from falling into chaos. Amazingly though, the solutions to many challenges are already held within your organization and team. How do you unleash the talent within and foster the flow of innovative ideas? In this hands-on and highly interactive session, Pollyanna Pixton and Todd Little introduce the principles of collaboration and the tools you need to create collaborative cultures in your team and organization. Combining principles with practice, you will learn how to use a proven collaboration process to generate new ideas and embrace change, identify barriers to innovation and agility, and discover novel ways to implement solutions. Practice these techniques and tools to become a more collaborative leader while learning the process for leading upwards and outwards.

Fearless change is about making a difference. In 2002 Todd happened upon an opportunity to make a difference. He met Alistair Cockburn at a conference and learned that Alistair had plans to start an Agile Development Conference. During the conversation, Todd and Alistair came to the realization that this wasn’t just another conference, this was about building a community and changing the world of work.

Like many companies, Landmark Graphics is a globally distributed organization and has faced challenges associated with distributed development. The leadership at Landmark knew that software is developed by people and that if they wanted to produce integrated enterprise software they needed to get the people developing the software better integrated. Todd shares some of his experiences at Landmark (and parent organization Halliburton) with specific examples and techniques that were used to bring multiple diverse corporate, geographic, and domain cultures towards a unified objective. At first the challenges were related to blending cultures of organizations through acquisition. Over time Landmark started working with offshore outsourcing providers and discovered new challenges. Ultimately it comes down to communication and understanding. The agile community often talks about changing culture, but often it is more effective to understand culture and then work to maximize effectiveness. By understanding culture, and understanding individuals and interactions, it is possible to adapt and to be agile.

In this presentation, Todd discusses the concept of an Agile Leader by examining the Declaration of Interdependence, including a history of its creation.

Meyers and Briggs popularized Carl Jung’s work on personality type. This presentation explains type and temperament and has been found to be very useful to teams to help them understand themselves and each other.

The Enneagram shares some similarities and is complimentary with Jungian type, but also has some important differences. Fundamentally the Enneagram is based on the compulsion and is quite helpful to self and group understanding. It also provides a path of transformation that allows getting through unhealthy compulsions.

Organizations struggle with whether to have Product Line or Functional alignment, or some form of formal or semi-formal Matrix organization. This presentation examines the benefits of each form of organization and why each could and should be utilized.

Regulated, high-capital environments often see local optimization due to excessive constraints while the broader system stalls. We present a real-world AI deployment for real-time optimization of oil wells to show how shifting from local to system-level and Agile/Lean thinking unlocked learning, throughput, and scale. The result: a 14X+ increase in delivery velocity with improved quality leading to multiple millions in value generation. Attendees leave with practical techniques applicable to complex, compliance-driven environments deploying AI/ML solutions.

In this podcast conversation, Todd Little looks at how AI is changing the flow of work across the value chain, from product management and project management to development and testing, and what that means for the people and practices involved.

Has your Scrum implementation failed to reach the expected benefits or stalled out? You’re not alone – Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of the Scrum Framework has stated that 58% of Scrum implementations fail. The Kanban Method can help.

This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile. In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about Scrum and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins.” The presentation aims to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.

Too often people in the software industry propose the magic bullet "one size fits all" approach to leading and managing projects. As any experienced leader knows, each project has its unique characteristics and it is the context of these characteristics that must influence how best to lead and manage the project and the teams. The Context Leadership Model looks at uncertainty and complexity and has found that these two attributes of a project provide guidance to effective leadership, risk management and overall governance.

The #NoEstimates twitter hashtag was intended by Woody Zuill "..for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates [of time, effort, cost] for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’." Based on twitter traffic it has been successful at generating activity. It's a bit debatable as to whether it has really spawned much exploration. In this talk Todd will actually do some exploration using real data from over 50 projects at companies ranging from startups to large enterprises. In addition to the analysis of the data, Todd was able to build a simulation model of the software development process to both replicate the data to and explore the conditions under which estimates add value and when they do not. Based on the findings from the data and the simulations, along with an analysis of the types of business decisions that organizations need to make, Todd will provide some pragmatic advice for estimators and #NoEstimators alike.

In the world of software development, estimation challenges exist on multiple fronts. Teams are faced with estimating value, cost, and/or schedule at the task, story, project, and/or portfolio level. There are some agile practices that claim to help with estimation, including not doing estimation at all, but still many agile projects are challenged. In this session Todd will look into some of the reasons for these challenges by exploring a number of myths of software estimation and then setting out to validate or bust these myths. Learn what the real data says, not what some pundit says should be true. Some of the myths that will be explored include:

Todd Little, chairman of the Kanban University, calls himself an ‘accidental agilist’. He joins Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita to discuss why the Agile movement is failing in a lot of companies, which often leads to ‘Agile is dead’ statements. They start by looking at how agile courses make people happy, but don’t deliver what they promise. Then they check why comparing Scrum to Kanban doesn’t make sense and deep dive into the Kanban approach to improving knowledge work delivery. Todd explains why the Kanban approach prefers smaller changes over large transformations, as the former can often bring significant improvements. They discuss whether the ‘meet them where they are’ approach can lead to a local optimum of ‘better waterfall’, and how the organization can improve by understanding delays and managing dependencies.

Is Agile Dead Yet? 2023 and 2024 saw many organizations make wholesale cuts to their agile roles and Agile Centers of Excellence. Capital One had been a long time agile advocate and made waves when they eliminated 1100 agile positions. Target had been quite famous for their Dojo approach, yet they also made significant cuts to their agile roles. This is just the start of the list.

John D. C. Little’s Law has been used in queuing theory for over half a century. It is an elegant explanation of the relationship between average throughput, Work in Progress (WIP), and cycle time. In a stable environment, it gives us a good understanding of the performance of the system which can be used for the design of our system and forecasting.

What do all project managers fear? Delays! Delays can come in multiple forms and the astute project manager needs to be able to identify and anticipate where delays may come.

Our society spends many years training linear thinking. But linear thinking approaches can fail miserably when the world is uncertain. What can we do to help people learn how to manage in the presence of uncertainty?

Lean Kanban is the premier source of professional Kanban training, and it is also a Kanban business run with a Kanban mindset. Todd Little and Janice Linden-Reed share how the company applies the Kanban Method to running its own business: starting with what they do now, visualizing the work, balancing demand and capability as the business grew rapidly, and using feedback loops to evolve.

Speed to market and quality of execution issues are forcing many companies to rethink how they advance an idea from conception to launch. Experienced product developers know that eliminating key front end and commercialization activities to cut development time is a recipe for disaster. Conversely not launching on time or ahead of the pack can result in far lower revenue generation, market share attainment and a reduced lifecycle resulting in more pressure on the product developers to find and launch the next great hope. Building agility into a Stage-Gate process and underpinning with Agile, Lean and Stage-Gate principles has been found to be an effective solution for addressing the need for speed yet quality of activity execution. Join long time Agile and Stage-Gate practitioner and expert Todd Little as he shares his experiences integrating agility and agility principles into Stage-Gate idea-to-launch processes. Todd will explore 6 key takeaways from agile and lean approaches that provide the backbone for an efficient and effective NPD process in this highly interactive and hands on session.

Agile software development has become very popular lately. Just what is agile development? Todd spends some time to introduce the history, values, and practices of agile development and also navigates through some of the agile soup such as Scrum, eXtreme Programming, Lean, Kanban, Agile Alliance, APLN and others.

This is an adaptation of the XP Lego Game developed by Thoughtworks. I have tweaked it a bit to add some product issues such as aesthetics (usability/quality/design) and market uncertainty.

The “Cone of Uncertainty” of software estimation was first defined by Barry Boehm over 25 years ago. The fundamental aspects of the cone are quite intuitive—that project uncertainty decreases as more is discovered during the project. Todd Little takes an in depth look into some of the dynamics of software estimation, and questions some of the more common interpretations of the meaning of the “cone.” Todd presents data from over 100 “for market” projects developed by a market-leading software company and compares this data with other industry published data. Delegates will discover some of the patterns of software estimation accuracy, some of which go against common industry beliefs. Understanding the uncertainty bounds and patterns greatly helps to understand how to manage for the uncertainty. Delegates will take away from this class the following:

This is a summary of a simple set of software metrics that can be utilized to help a development team or organization understand where they are at.