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by Levent Gorur

August Meeting Epilogue: Applying Lean Principles to Marketing: An Overview

August 12, 2011 in Event Summary, Monthly Meetings

This is our second Lean presentation out of software/IS realm. We believe it’s important to open our eyes to other Agile/Lean practicing domains of other business functions. Mutually, we are all working for the same boss “Customer”

We started our night with pizza sponsored by Infotrust LLC.

Joe carried his presentation from manufacturing to marketing while he’s describing how marketing and sales organizations can utilize Lean principles and tools. Here are some highlights from his presentation.

Process is missing in Sales and Marketing.  No continuous improvement is possible without a methodology. You have to understand the metrics to understand the degree of improvement.

We’re not living in a supply driven world anymore, we’re now in a demand driven world. We really don’t have sales channel, we have touch points with customer.

We need to apply more Lean Thinking to our actions;

  • Appreciation of a system (embrace a system)
  • Theory of knowledge
  • The psychology of change
  • Knowledge about variation

Continuous Improvement is a necessity. Metrics are required to judge the rate and degree of improvement. There are also barriers to change; commission structures, understanding metrics and measurements.

Knowledge and Sales PDCA cycle is key part winning the customer.

You have to understand customer’s decision making process. Some of the tools that can be used in Sales and Marketing process are; Business Model Canvas, Customer Journey Canvas, Value co-creation canvas and A3.

Here are some of the links that Joe referred in his presentation, he also announced that he’s going to make his presentation available in Slideshare.

http://www.business901.com

http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com

Again, we’d like to thank Joe Dagger on behalf of Agile Cincinnati Community to share his knowledge and experience with us. You can reach him via email at jtdager using the first domain above.

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Avatar of Alan Bustamante

by Alan Bustamante

August Meeting – Applying Lean Principles to Marketing: An Overview

July 25, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

Abstract:

When one first hears the terms Lean and value stream, most think about manufacturing processes and waste. Putting the word marketing behind both of them is hardly creative or effective. Whether marketing meets Lean under this name or another, it will be very close to the Lean methodologies developed in software primarily under the Agile connotation. This presentation is about bridging that gap. It may not bring all the pieces into place, but it is a starting point for creating true iterative marketing cycles based on not only Lean principles but more importantly on customer value. It scares many. It is not about being in a cozy facility or going to Gemba on the factory floor. It is about starting with collaboration with your customer and not ending there. It is about creating sales teams that are made up of different departments, not other sales people.

Bio:

Joe DagerJoe Dager’s career had been primarily in the manufacturing of construction equipment. He started as a welder at Asphalt Drum Mixers (ADM) in 1977 advancing to President with a minority ownership. He sold his ownership position and left there in 1994 to start another business. He purchased Asphalt Machinery Corporation the following year and Burke Heating Systems Company in 1997. He implemented Lean manufacturing principles in each company then sold these two companies several years ago and have been consulting since that time.

His consulting has centered on training and coaching individuals and organizations in Lean marketing principles. In recent years, he has developed another set of programs, Achieving Expert Status, Marketing your Black Belt and Building the Lean Marketing House that he delivers as a program to quality consultants, leaders and organizations. He is well acquainted with the use of marketing plans on an individual and organizational level. However, his  experience is in using them as active documents that are constantly updated through continuous improvement.

More information is available through Joe’s Linkedin Profile, Joseph T. Dager or website: http://business901.com. You can also follow him on Twitter @business901

When: August 11 (Second Thursday of August).  Networking and dinner: 5:30-6pm. Program: 6-7:30pm.

Where: Max Training. 4900 Parkway Drive Suite 160 , Mason (Cincinnati), OH 45040

Food sponsor: InfoTrust, LLC

This event qualifies for 1 PDU. Attendees must pre-register through Eventbrite and sign in at the door to qualify.

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by Alan Bustamante

July Meeting Epilogue: Risk Based Compliance – Negotiating Pathways to Innovation

July 17, 2011 in Monthly Meetings

Are you a Ship or a Castle? Do you have a flexible process? Do you fail fast? Are you ensuring that you deliver customer value?  Many thanks to Teresa O’shea for asking these important questions during her presentation on Lean in Medical Devices. We saw first hand how J&J using smaller business units to maintain an innovative, Lean environment, then transfers successful products to the Castle.

Teresa talks about Ships and Castles

Teresa talks about Ships and Castles

Teresa talks about risk profiles

Teresa talks about risk profiles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our members who came out in support of a non-software topic.  Many of you commented on the relevance to creating the Lean organization which includes areas outside of software.  Indeed we have a forward thinking group!

Lastly, thanks to Seapine Software for proving the food!

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by Alan Bustamante

July Meeting – Risk-based compliance: Negotiating Pathways to Innovation

June 25, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

Note: In keeping with the Agile Cincinnati mission, to provide Lean/Agile topics for all areas of the organization, July’s topic will focus on lean principles applied outside of software development.

Abstract:

Connectedness of global markets, constrained healthcare resources, aging populations, chronic diseases, and the economics of healthcare puts healthcare systems in a crisis of affordability.  But who pays?

For a medtech company the market grows more complex.  Incremental innovation (making a better product) at higher prices will not sustain in the current market.  The medtech industry will see pressures like never before.  New consumers and patients are participating in healthcare choices and decisions like never before.  The non-clinical stakeholders like payers and materials managers, even the C-suite of the hospital are driving price transparency and economic pressures onto industry.  The healthcare stakeholders are shifting the acceptable levels of risk (legal, financial, clinical) and evidence-based medicine is driving market adoption dynamics. Comparative effectiveness studies, solutions beyond the medical job, growth of HTA’s, and longer regulatory approval times & increased hurdles contribute to the increased complexity. The capability to accelerate speed to key data is critical.

The paradox is that innovative technology can change healthcare delivery and put an end to the crisis.  Basic research breakthroughs are plentiful and innovation is necessary for business vitality.  New technology will drive above average growth in this market but buying the technology is expensive.  As L&A targets are increasing in cost, companies will turn to organic growth.

How will companies speed to data and technology innovation to reduce risks for patients, physicians, providers, and payers while complying with regulatory requirements and the pressures on their own business to be profitable and lean?

Bio:

Teresa OsheaTeresa serves as Director of Strategy Execution reporting to the Company Group Chairman of the Board for Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc. (a Johnson & Johnson company) in Cincinnati, OH.  In this position, Teresa is responsible for creating integrated business processes and programs to enable new strategic capabilities targeted at realization of the long term strategic plan of the company.

In Teresa’s prior position(s) she worked in the front-end pipeline processes with key physicians and inventors to bring first to market innovations from concept to clinical.  As Director of Quality Systems, Regulatory Affairs, and Short Run Manufacturing, she designed and implemented a risk-based quality system for outsourcing medical design and manufacture.

Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson in March 2001, Teresa held various positions for Global Compliance at Bausch & Lomb, Inc. and for Quality Systems and Regulatory Affairs at Mallinckrodt, Inc. Teresa has more than 20 years of experience in the medical device industry in quality, regulatory, compliance, and clinical affairs over multiple specialty areas spanning global operations, new product development, and worldwide commercial enterprise.

Teresa holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and applied mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

When: July 14 (Second Thursday of July).  Networking and dinner: 5:30-6pm. Program: 6-7:30pm.

Where: Max Training. 4900 Parkway Drive Suite 160 , Mason (Cincinnati), OH 45040

Food sponsor: Seapine Software. Thank you!Seapine Softare

This event qualifies for 1 PDU. Attendees must pre-register through Eventbrite and sign in at the door to qualify.

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by Levent Gorur

June Meeting Epilogue: Experience Report – Agile in Transition

June 12, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

We had a great night with ‘Experience Report – Agile in Transition’ from Nilanjan Raychaudhuri about the Agile transformation that he’s leading. He enlightened our way to FAIL FAST, from FAILING LAST.

Attendance was high; the value of discussion after presentation is the proof of that we all share Nilanjan’s vision about embracing change, delivering value and customer satisfaction.

A lot of thanks to Nilanjan, coming from Columbus to spend time with us.

Information Control Corporation

Our sponsor was ICC and we had a great food and networking time prior to presentation with their support.

Thanks everyone for their attendance and making that night worthwhile…

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by juthika

June Meeting: Experience Report: Agile in Transition

June 9, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

Abstract:

Ever wonder what it’s like to go through an Agile transformation?  What challenges have other’s faced? What are the pitfalls?  What does it take to succeed?  Who should be involved in the effort?  How do we maintain the momentum?

This experience report begins with us picking up the pieces after an eighteen month long failed project. Fail last. The current software development practices failed to deliver so the company was looking for a new way to write software. Like many companies out there, they got a consultant…me. We’ll cover what happened to the project after working on it for 18 months using fail fast approach and faster feedback loop. You’ll learn what happened when a team grew from 6 members to 18 and from managing one product to three products.  Every project has a story, come learn from mine.

Bio:

Nilanjan Raychaudhuri is an Agile coach for Pillar Technology Inc. (http://pillartechnology.com/) and prior to that, was a senior developer with ThoughtWorks Inc. (www.thoughtWorks.com).  Over the past 12 years he has held both management and contributor roles on software projects, and specialized in integrated multi-tiered web and server applications. Nilanjan is passionate about the elimination of design, code, data, and effort duplication; and believes in the value of high-discipline agile methodologies, customer focus, and continuous improvement.   He is currently working on scala-webmachine (restful resource framework) and in the past, has worked on other open source projects such as Panopticode, scala-inline and autotest4j. In his spare time, Nilanjan likes to play with functional programming and DSL; as well as, work on his upcoming book “Scala in Action” from Manning publication.

When: June 9 (Second Thursday of June).  Networking and dinner: 5:30-6pm. Presentation: 6-7:30pm.

Where: Max Training. 4900 Parkway Drive Suite 160 , Mason (Cincinnati), OH 45040

Food sponsor: Information Control Corporation. Thank you!

ICC

This event qualifies for 1 PDU. Attendees must pre-register through Eventbrite and sign in at the door to qualify.

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by Alan Bustamante

May Meeting Epilogue: How to Optimize Your Agile Work Environment

May 15, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

Workspaces Metrics

Sean Talks About Metrics

Many thanks to Sean Heuer for giving us a behind the scenes look at his experience helping teams turn their mundane work spaces into high performance Agile work spaces! Among other things, Sean told us to make sure that high performance work spaces promote free flowing communication and increased job satisfaction.  Sean also shared with us some stats based on his research and concluded with some workspace lay out options.

We had our largest attendance to date at this months meeting, so thanks to everyone who made it possible!  Like last month, we saw many new faces, which means that word is spreading about Agile Cincinnati.  Our goal is to be the premier Agile community in the Cincinnati area and that would not be possible without the support of our membership.

Pilot Team Results

Results From The Pilot

In this months meeting we announced some updates to our website, including job postings, training (announced in April’s epilogue), and volunteering.  We now have volunteer positions posted and are looking for motivated individuals who can commit some of their personal time to make Agile Cincinnati great.  Job postings are free, but must be Agile/Lean related. Contact the AC leadership at info@agilecincinnati.org for more info.  Additionally we are now on twitter. You can follow us @agilecincinnati.

For those seeking to sponsor Agile Cincinnati, we will have updated sponsorship guidelines very soon, so stay tuned!

 

 

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by Alan Bustamante

May Meeting: How to Optimize Your Agile Work Environment

April 26, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

Title:

How to Optimize Your Agile Work Environment

Abstract:

One rarely mentioned component of building a high performing Agile team, is optimizing their work environment.  For a collocated team, what is the best possible physical environment we can create to help the team reach the next level.  Is it bigger tables?  Is it better lighting?  Is it more whiteboard space?  Is it all of these?  Also, how much of a difference does a team’s physical surroundings make?  I was recently given the opportunity to find out.  In this talk, I will walk through the typical physical environment many teams deal with and provide insight into how to go about improving that space.  I will not offer a one-size-fits-all solution.  Instead, I will help you identify the variables in your environment and provide tools for you to use to optimize your own space.

Bio:

Sean HeuerSean Heuer (CSM, CSP) began his technical career as a Java developer, but after discoveringScrum, he became a Certified ScrumMaster and has never looked back.  Sean’s experience includes, acting as an Agile Coach/Evangelist on multiple projects for the Kroger Co., at its technical center in Blue Ash, Ohio, leading the Agile Community within Kroger Co., and co-leading the Agile Adoption Initiative at Kroger Co.  Sean has coached several project teams through their transition to Scrum and constantly challenges all stakeholders to continuously improve through Agile.  He is now a Senior Consultant with Sogeti, where he is continuing his mission to help others improve, while diversifying his experience and growing as an Agile Coach.

When: May 12 (Second Thursday in May).  Networking and dinner: 5:30-6pm. Presentation: 6-7:30pm.

Where: Max Training. 4900 Parkway Drive Suite 160 , Mason (Cincinnati), OH 45040

This event qualifies for 1 PDU. Attendees must pre-register through Eventbrite and sign in at the door to qualify.

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by Alan Bustamante

April Meeting Epilogue:Code as Design for Agile projects

April 23, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

Mark Haskamp

Mark Haskamp - Don't confuse Darth Maul with Jar Jar Binks

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – Martin Golding

Thanks to  Mark Haskamp for giving us this great quote and many others to help describe the how Agile development practices provide a way for development teams make sure they are building quality systems.  We saw how adopting the “code as design” mentality can help software engineers think from a systems perspective, which means they think just as much about the upstream and downstream affects of their code; as they do about the feature their working on.

 

 

Good Questions from the Audience

Good Questions from the Audience

We had great audience participation, so thanks for the many good questions and comments!  Again, this month we had a few new faces which made it extra special. Thanks to the many of you who are making Agile Cincinnati a leading organization for all things Agile in the Cincinnati area!

New this month, based on member recommendation from the April meeting, we will be adding Ohio area training and conference events to the “Training Events” part of the website.  Stay tuned to this part of our website for information on upcoming Agile related training and conference events in the Ohio Indiana, and Kentucky areas.

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by juthika

April meeting: Code is the design

April 14, 2011 in Events, Monthly Meetings

When: Second Thursday of the month i.e. 4/14 at 5:30 pm. Networking and dinner 5:30-6pm. Presentation starts at 6pm.

Where: Max Training. 4900 Parkway Drive Suite 160 , Mason (Cincinnati), OH 45040

Abstract:

In 1992, Jack W. Reeves wrote an essay titled “What Is Software Design?”.

In the essay Reeves makes the claim “that final source code is the real software design.” It should be required reading for the IT profession.

In our next meeting Mark Haskamp will help us explore the concept of ‘Code as Design’ with a high level review of the essay. We’ll also examine current day examples that provide further proof for Reeves’ claim. Finally, we’ll discuss how we can take the notion of ‘Code as Design’ and apply it on the job to make us better understand agile developers (or should that be ‘designers’?)

Bio:

Mark HaskampMark Haskamp is a Principal Consultant with Pinnacle Solutions Group, Inc., located in Cincinnati.  He’s a curious geek with almost 30 years experience writing software. His current focus in the office is Asp.Net MVC but he’s delivered solutions across the technology spectrum of C++, Perl, Java, C#, Ruby and jquery. His current shiny pennies are jquery and sinatra.

As always dinner is on us and registration is free. Please RSVP to our Eventbrite  invitation at http://agilecinciapril.eventbrite.com/ so we can get an accurate headcount for dinner.

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