Yes, we Kanban in Munich

Atlassian is on the way to Munich for the first Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference. The event will take place at October 17th and 18th at an absolutely fantastic venue in the middle of Munich: The Münchner Künstlerhaus.

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a new lightweight approach to evolutionary change in software development, transferring principles from lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System.

Wikipedia describes Kanban as:

Kanbanis a method for developing products with an emphasis on just-in-time delivery while not overloading the developers. It emphasizes that developers pull work from a queue, and the process, from definition of a task to its delivery to the customer, is displayed for participants to see.

Kanban can be divided into two parts:

• Kanban - A visual process management system that tells what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.
• The Kanban Method - an approach to incremental, evolutionary process change for organizations

The Kanban Method is rooted in these basic principles:

1. Start with what you do now
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
3. Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles

For this reason, Kanban is also interesting for companies which are, for example, already applying scrum successfully.

Kanban at Atlassian

Various teams within Atlassian have been using Kanban over the past few years. Our support, operations and maintenance teams have had great success with Kanban. These teams often focus on the lead time, that is, the time from when the issue was raised to when it was completed. More recently two development teams have adopted Kanban with the assistance of GreenHopper. These two teams focus on maintaining a consistent cycle time (the time taken from when work on an issue begins to when it is completed) and getting their stories to a fairly consistent size. This assists them in planning and identifying when certain functionality will be delivered to customers.

GreenHopper will get you started with a Kanban preset and as you conduct retrospectives and tweak your process you'll grow to love the flexibility that is available.

Join us in Munich

We are thrilled to be in Munich at Lean Kanban Central Europe.

If you live in Central Europe and want to learn more about Lean Product Development and Kanban whilst sharing your experience with other developers and project manager, come and join us. There is nowhere else in Europe where you will meet such great experts:

There are great talks about how to scale Kanban and how to sell it to your boss. There'll be a whole track with experience reports from companies like SAP, XING, Ericsson, BBC and many more.

Atlassian Sponsored Gala Dinner

On monday evening at 7pm, Atlassian and Lean Kanban Central Europe invites you to the Gala Dinner. The Dinner is free of charge for conference attendees, but the seats are limited. So register now and maybe talk to Kent Beck over a beer. Just limit your Work In Progress to zero for a few hours, relax and have a great dinner and a few drinks. You can also come and talk to us about the new Rapid Board in GreenHopper or the CFD (cumulative flow diagram) chart - JIRA Dashboard feature.