LPPDE A Hit!
I spent last week at the Lean Product & Process Development Exchange, and it was wonderful! It exceeded my expectations by far. We ended up with around 100 enthusiastic and engaged attendees, give or take a few each day.
Monday was Workshop Day, with four workshops. The most popular was Jim Luckman's Value Stream Mapping for Product Development. That one was a bit crowded but very well-received. The workshop I conducted with Jamie Flinchbaugh, Leadership Skills for Lean Product Developers also had a nice group. This was the first time he and I had done this workshop, and we learned as much as the participants. We had an engaged group with lively discussion that took us where we needed to go. The two half-day workshops also filled up, and received good reviews.
Tuesday and Wednesday were the meat of the conference. The big surprise was the real-time debate between Ellen Domb, a TRIZ expert and Michael Kennedy, the knowledge-based development expert. Michael encourages his clients to understand the trade-offs inherent in product design, while TRIZ encourages developers to transcend trade-offs to find ideal results. The synergies between the two approaches became crystal-clear as the debate proceeded over the two days, and I am looking forward to seeing what the two of them come up with as they put their heads together.
The Open Exchange sessions on Wednesday also exceeded my expectations. We really didn't know what to expect. The participants nominated over thirty topics on Tuesday. Voting and combining narrowed those to eighteen topics for Wednesday afternoon, split between three sessions. Although our intention was to have small groups of ten or less, many topic groups became larger than that, and were resistant to splitting up. Instead, one group took over the hallway to get enough space for everyone, and another merged two circles into one. We had assigned a thought leader or presenter to each group to facilitate, and they did a good job of leading the discussion, whether the groups were a handful or much larger.
The topics included things like SBCE, Metrics, Global Product Development, SW Tools and Knowledge Creation and beyond. I participated in sessions on Synergies between Agile and Lean, Integration Events and SBCE. Many of the participants who planned to leave early were sorry to miss the experience. We will definitely do this again next year.
We also learned that many of the participants wanted more opportunities to learn about the basics of Lean Product Development. We will address that with a tutorial webinar series this fall, and with more targeted workshops next spring.
The week before the conference, the LPPDE Board approved the 2009 Lean Product and Process Development Exchange! We have already begun to look at locations and will announce the final dates by June 30, 2008.
I hope to see you there!
Monday was Workshop Day, with four workshops. The most popular was Jim Luckman's Value Stream Mapping for Product Development. That one was a bit crowded but very well-received. The workshop I conducted with Jamie Flinchbaugh, Leadership Skills for Lean Product Developers also had a nice group. This was the first time he and I had done this workshop, and we learned as much as the participants. We had an engaged group with lively discussion that took us where we needed to go. The two half-day workshops also filled up, and received good reviews.
Tuesday and Wednesday were the meat of the conference. The big surprise was the real-time debate between Ellen Domb, a TRIZ expert and Michael Kennedy, the knowledge-based development expert. Michael encourages his clients to understand the trade-offs inherent in product design, while TRIZ encourages developers to transcend trade-offs to find ideal results. The synergies between the two approaches became crystal-clear as the debate proceeded over the two days, and I am looking forward to seeing what the two of them come up with as they put their heads together.
The Open Exchange sessions on Wednesday also exceeded my expectations. We really didn't know what to expect. The participants nominated over thirty topics on Tuesday. Voting and combining narrowed those to eighteen topics for Wednesday afternoon, split between three sessions. Although our intention was to have small groups of ten or less, many topic groups became larger than that, and were resistant to splitting up. Instead, one group took over the hallway to get enough space for everyone, and another merged two circles into one. We had assigned a thought leader or presenter to each group to facilitate, and they did a good job of leading the discussion, whether the groups were a handful or much larger.
The topics included things like SBCE, Metrics, Global Product Development, SW Tools and Knowledge Creation and beyond. I participated in sessions on Synergies between Agile and Lean, Integration Events and SBCE. Many of the participants who planned to leave early were sorry to miss the experience. We will definitely do this again next year.
We also learned that many of the participants wanted more opportunities to learn about the basics of Lean Product Development. We will address that with a tutorial webinar series this fall, and with more targeted workshops next spring.
The week before the conference, the LPPDE Board approved the 2009 Lean Product and Process Development Exchange! We have already begun to look at locations and will announce the final dates by June 30, 2008.
I hope to see you there!
Labels: LPPDE
posted by Katherine Radeka
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