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Alan Shalloway

Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With over 40 years of experience, Alan is an industry thought leader in Lean, Kanban, Scrum and design patterns. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in these areas. Alan has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped his clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility and is currently writing Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. Alan has worked in literally dozens of industries over his career. He is a co-founder and board member for the Lean Software and Systems Consortium. He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University. You can follow Alan on twitter @alshalloway

Agile and Lean take two different approaches to product management. Agile has historically concerned itself with team based approaches and then scaled them to the enterprise. Hence, the role of the product owner to tell the team what to do. Lean has always suggested starting with the entire value stream in mind. This affords a different approach – one starting from the beginning of the value stream.

While the product owner approach works fine for a company where each team is associated with one product, it falls short in organizations where there are multiple product lines associated with multiple teams in a many-to-many manner. Many product owners attempt to overcome this complexity via heroic efforts, but a better set of roles, responsibilities and communication is required for effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability.

This talk presents a structure for coordinating multiple business stakeholders across multiple development teams. It discusses the roles of the business stakeholder, product manager, product owner and teams in the flow of information from concept through consumption by the customer. The concepts are based on the principles of lean-product flow and have been successfully demonstrated at several large organizations. In addition, the seminar will discuss how coordinating the backlog of features provided to different teams can lower the amount of coordination required between the teams themselves.

Many of the speakers at the Lean Software & Systems Conference are well known for writing about things not typically thought of as pure Lean. Cynefin & Complexity Science, Maneuver Warfare and Theory of Constraints are all represented at this year's conference. There is little talk of the "pillars of Lean" as Womack and Jones might have defined them, and few references to Toyota concepts such as "muda", "mura" and "muri". Many of our leading authors and speakers use different terminology and those published authors amongst us have seldom used the word "Lean" in the titles of their publications. So do we really mean "Lean?" And if we do, how is the Lean Software & Systems Consortium defining Lean? Have we moved on beyond the established manufacturing definitions? And if so, how should our community see Lean? Does the Consortium need to re-define Lean in their own terms?