Personal Kanban at Agile 2012

Since my coaching friend Mike Lowery described his experience at Agile 2006 as a life-changing event I really wanted to go to this conference.

This year after having been part of Esther Derby and Geoff Watt's submission review team for the conference's coaching stage I decided that I needed to make it happen: I had seen amazing submissions from seriously smart people and I was inspired.

I arrived in Texas three days ago and now that I, in a spirit of total Texas immersion, have got the gun range experience out of the way and have finished all possible preparation on my presentation I'm looking forward to inspiring sessions and talking to amazing people in the Agile world.

In my talk "The Evils of Multi-tasking and how Personal Kanban Can Help You" I'm going to talk about how multi-tasking slows us down both physically and mentally.

I'll explain the research on and theory behind why multi-tasking is bad at every level and through telling the story of Snapper, a company based in New Zealand, I will show how an entire organisation organically adapted Agile practices to extend from the organisational and team level to the personal and individual space. I will demonstrate how personal Kanban works and how my colleagues and I are using it.

I will talk about how Agile on a team level has helped us to adopt Agile and Lean practices in our daily work lives and will describe how the people at Snapper and the organisation as a whole have benefitted from the use of personal Kanban. I will also show the personal Kanban boards that have popped up everywhere around the office.

So if you’re at Agile 2012 please do come along on Thursday, 11am -12, Ft Worth 1-2 and until then I recommend having a look on the personal Kanban boards we designed at Snapper - it works and it looks good in your office. If you'd like to get your own pick one up at the conference bookstore or order it online.

UPDATE:

My presentation went incredibly well and I received the nicest feedback ever. Here are my slides: