Scrum and Kanban equals Agile

On the Business901 Podcast I had the pleasure this week interviewing Eric Landes. Eric is an Agile Project Manager who has been using Kanban for software development since 2007. He has worked with Scrum, XP and other agile methods for over the past 5 years, and has been managing software projects for over 10 years. Eric has his own blog, Corporate Coder which can be found at http://EricLandes.com. He is also a frequent contributor to http://developer.com.

Eric first caught my eye when I was reviewing the conference speakers and workshops being hosted by the Lean Software and Systems Conference held last April in Atlanta. I had noticed that he was presenting a real life scenario of how an Operations Group’s Kanban adoption failed to improve cycle times. The session ended up in a 5 Why session and a Q & A to discuss other situations that had not produced results. I thought it was an excellent way to stimulate discussion and to learn more about Kanban versus the typical “this is what we did” approach.

This approach also told me a lot about the person. Someone that is comfortable with their failures represents someone that has a lot of self-confidence and most of the time knowledge. My instincts were not proven wrong. The podcast was down to earth with little if any lets change the culture rhetoric we so often hear. Our discussion started with Agile drilling down to Scrum, the last twenty minutes on Kanban and what he has learned implementing it. This is someone that knows what to do with a sticky note!

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