Kanban :: Lean Sales and Marketing thru Service Design Thinking

Archive for Kanban

May

Defining the Roles of Lean IT

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The IT Department now touches every corner of the organization and many times is responsible for the first touchpoint a customer has with your organization. No longer is IT a bunch of Geeks in the back room. Learn from Steve Bell, one of the foremost experts in the Lean IT world. This is a transcription of the Business901 podcast, Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell.

Steve Bell, the founder of Lean IT Strategies LLC. Steve is a Lean Enterprise Institute faculty member, Shingo Research Prize winning author, and Lean IT pioneer. A recent blog post, When Standard Work and Customer Focus come together contains an excerpt from the podcast.

For more than twenty five years, Steve Bell has delivered a balance of Lean, business process improvement, and management consulting services. Steve published Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement helping to introduce the emerging discipline of Lean IT. Steve and his partner Mike Orzen later published Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation.

Steve is on of the keynotes at the upcoming, North American Lean IT Summit, bringing together a community of lean and agile practitioners and thought leaders from around the globe.

Kanban Evolution with Anderson

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David J. Anderson, author of the defining book on Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business appeared on my program back in October 2011 and this is a transcription of the Business901 Podcast, Evolutionary Change thru Kanban. David is the host of the Lean Software & Systems Conference.

LSSC 2012 Boston is bringing three premiere events to one centralized location to facilitate the next wave of ideas in methods, process and organization for software & systems engineering development. Boston is the premiere place to be for those innovating in the Lean community.

David is credited with the first implementation of a process for software development, in 2005. David leads a management consulting firm focused on improving performance of technology companies. He has been in software development nearly 30 years and has managed teams on agile software development projects at Sprint, Motorola, Microsoft, and Corbis.

David’s first book, Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results, published in 2003 by Prentice Hall, and introduced many ideas from Lean and Theory of Constraints into software engineering. David can be found at AgileManagement.net

Blog Carnival Annual Roundup: 2011: The 99 Percent Solution

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I am honored this year to be part of John Hunter’s Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival. John is one of the pioneers in just not using internet technology but in using it to improve organizational performance and in a way to get results. I encourage you to browse his site. It is littered with information and few aspects of continuous improvement cannot be found there.

My first blog of the week to review is The 99 Percent Solution. which is part of Behance founded by Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality. I have been a big fan of the blog and so has many others. It has won the Webby Award for Best Cultural Blog and was chosen as one of the “Top 6 Sites That Inspire and Educate” by Intel’s “My Life Scoop” page.

The 99% solution’s blog is about providing Insights on making ideas happen. And they practice what they preach; their site is uniquely laid out for both the first time and the daily visitor. The website’s home page opens to an array of choices, visually displayed so you can quickly locate subject matter. What is unique about the site is that you have a good idea from the headings, how much time you will spend. For example, are you willing to watch a video, read a tip or an article or research a book?

One of my favorite 99% posts this year was this video Beth Comstock: Make Heroes Out of the Failures. Beth is GE’s SVP and Chief Marketing Officer and she talked to Scott Belsky about what it takes to keep great ideas alive in a big company. Offering essential insights for creative leaders, the conversation touches on the power of passion and storytelling in getting ideas off the ground, why we should make heroes out of failures, and the challenges of driving change amidst bureaucracy.

The site includes a Tip section that gives you incredibly powerful insights in over 30 different productivity categories. A favorite tip that I have been trying to put to use lately (don’t think I am not busy, I am swamped) was, What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space. It says, “However, despite the incredible power and potential of sacred spaces, they are quickly becoming extinct. We are depriving ourselves of every opportunity for disconnection. And our imaginations suffer the consequences.”

The strongest connection I have to this site is through their time management system called The Action Method. It is my management planner of choice. It is extremely simple and highly intuitive for a single person and/or team. I use the paper, online and the app for my iPhone all in combination with very little redundant work. The Action Planner creates a system that emphasizes action steps and having the supporting resources available. It is laid out very similar to a Personal Kanban System.

The action methods, Scott’s writings and the website resemble a Lean approach in so many ways that it is natural fit for use in Lean sales and marketing. I have blogged about it several times in the past but the 99 percent’s Action Method concepts simply describe standard work for the creative side of the business. A part of every job description at Behance says it all: