Joakim Sundén

This week Limited WIP Society Stockholm/Sweden had its first gathering at the Avega Group office. Limited WIP Society is actually a web site, created by Rob Hathaway and others, that aims to be a central place to gather information such as blogs, articles and screen casts about Kanban - “the home of Kanban software development”. At the last night of the UK Lean and Kanban Conference a few weeks ago the people behind the site organized an IRL meeting with a few speakers and other activities. Mattias Skarin and I talked about this at the conference and came up with the idea that it would be fun to do something similar in Stockholm.

Unfortunately our busy schedules made it difficult to find a good date and when we finally settled for one it was only a week away. We sent out invitations to two mailing lists, Agile Sweden and ALT.NET Sweden, with a last registration date five days away hoping to at least round up a few enthusiasts to exchange experiences and ideas. “Perfect is the enemy of good enough” and all that… So you can understand that I was a little surprised to find that over 50 registrations soon filled up my mailbox; there is apparently a great interest in Kanban in the Stockholm agile community!

The meeting started with Mattias introducing Kanban in ten minutes followed by a case study, “Converting a Scrum team to Kanban”. You can find the slides and other nice stuff on Kanban at http://www.crisp.se/limitedwip.

Torbjörn Gyllebring from Cint presented a second case study about “sneaking” Kanban into a company: “stealthban” (“smygban” in Swedish).

Last but not least I presented a case study about a Scrum team that was doing pretty well but still decided to pick up Kanban as an answer to particular problems:

You can also find my slides as a PDF in the Talks section of my blog.

I think the talks were great and they seemed to be really well received, stimulating some really good questions that we unfortunately didn’t have time to dig deeper into before the Avega Group and Crisp sponsored (thanks!) pizza slices and beers.

After dinner a majority of the remaining participants played The Bottleneck Game led by Mattias Skarin and Henrik Kniberg as a prolonged Open Space session while the rest of us discussed different Kanban related topics in sessions such as “analogue/digital/hybrid Kanban board” and “Kanban and RUP”.

In the closing of the Open Space people seemed very pleased with the evening and many asked when the next meeting will be. Judging from the interest in the first one and how fun it was my answer is: soon!