Kanban Australia 2023

📅 The event program

I was surprised that as the first edition of such an event, the program would have 3 streams of talks. Initially, I was afraid it was too ambitious for a first edition, but what a delightful surprise to perceive that we had enough corum for all the 3 streams of talks.

The program had talks covering different areas and applications of Kanban, including startups, augmented reality, corporate, innovation and others.

🎤 Talks I attended

Besides presenting my Kanban for Startups talk in the first slot, I also had the pleasure of attending other amazing talks:

🤫 What the scale frameworks are not telling you

Mike Burrows was the first keynote and he presented an insightful talk about how to scale processes using Kanban.

My 3 takeaways from his talk were:

• Failures of flow and failures of collaboration are normally Failures of context. (Who was missing, which information was missing, date dimension as well)

• Every vertical line on a Kanban board is a relationship opportunity

• Boards for End vs Boards for Means. Don’t mix them and don’t form people from one to manage the other.

🏂🏾 Steering through market shifts

The famous Marcio Sete presented a visually pleasant talk about how to have control over the delivery machine in a market that is always moving.

My 3 takeaways from his talk were:

• Turn PMO into VMO (Value Management Office) 🤯

• The accelerated market shift brings new opportunities (Canva magic example)

• Stop discussing individuals, start discussing teams

🧑🏾‍🔬 Getting real with Kanban

Kynan Stewart Hughes presented an intriguing talk based on his Ph.D. work. He showed us a live demo of Flow Attractor, an augmented reality tool he is developing to help teams visualise the flow of their creative work.

My 3 takeaways from his talk were:

• Don’t stare at first-person animations for too long as I can get dizzy 😊

• Don’t be so quick to judge a system that is unstable

• Visual tools can make the Little Law’s effect more tangible

• Measure more often

🥷🏾 The strange absence of Kanban in Australia

Amanda presented the best slides in the whole conference. She decided to compare with Kanban adoption in Australia, versus her experience on other countries.

It was a talk full of lessons and useful tips.

As the picture above demonstrates, it was hard to reduce her talk to 3 takeaways but here we go 😅:

• Poor economies cannot afford waste, thus a higher adoption of Kanban methods

• Leadership is a must to improve the flow

• Don’t coach the team, coach the leaders

🚀 The 3 futures of work

To close the event we had the great Lynne Cazaly presenting on the 3 futures of work!!! 💥

My 3 takeaways were:

• Non-linear work (whoever, whenever, whatever)

• Opportunities for Kanban: Quiet hiring, pandemic trauma

• Make the work environment as comfortable as the home

🔍 Overall impression

I can’t believe this was the very first Kanban Australia, it was so well organised and everything went smoothly. It was good to exchange knowledge with other thought leaders in the delivery space. My talk was well received and people believe I should share it with other forums as well.

I will return to the next editions and offer my help to organise as well.

10 Oct 2023