An Evening with Kanban - GDG Dublin

Few months into the Career Resolutions I set for myself and I'm struggling with 1 in particular and that's going to events.

So it took me until April to go to my first one and I ended up travelling all the way to Dublin with some colleagues to attend an evening with kanban in the Google Dublin offices which was being put on by the Google Developers Group Dublin (god love them they have google+ account as well) and Lean Kanban Inc.

I always find the networking part the hardest at these events. Always have and probably always will. I decided this time I would engage a stranger in conversation so after grabbing a cookie I decided to attempt my icebreaker. "I know we Can Ban, but I think the question is should we because you know censorship" (yes I know, I know it was terrible but I didn't have much time to think of a kanban pun so leave me alone) it was met with confusion and then they just sort of looked away so I scampered back beside my colleagues as a single tear strolled down my cheek. As Drake would say "No new Friends" :( I can't be the only one to struggle with this right?

Next time maybe I'll try and be a grown up and ask how people find using Kanban, I just feel like if you can't accept me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best...

The talkers were from Paddy Power and David Anderson who wrote the book on Kanban, no he actually did. Paddy power told us about their personal journey and an overview of their working process and it was all very inspiring with delivery pipelines and autonomous co-located teams hammering value out left, right and centre.

David Anderson took us on a journey of his own introduction of Kanban in a U.S telecoms company before going over some kanban design patterns that he's seen in the wild. 

The talks were great and they reaffirmed for me the reasons why at NantHealth (formerly NaviNet) we use Kanban. I think every now and again it's good to take that step back from what you do every day to see how other people are evolving their processes and increasing their value add and really trying to get back to brass tacks of why we went on that journey in the first place.

So small social embarrassment aside it was a really worthwhile journey from Belfast and a big thank you to the organizers and presenters for such a slick overview.