Wow, it is over a year since my last blog post. What happened? I guess I had other things to do… These are some of them, just so you don’t think I’m making it up.

Turku Agile Day

I gave a talk on Kanban at Turku Agile Day about a year ago. I really liked the conference and the talk was well received. So well in fact that they invited me this year as well. This year I did Deming’s Red Bead Experiment again (thanks to David Joyce for slides and inspiration).

Developer Summit
Only a couple of days after my third child (Albin) was born, I did a Kanban talk at Developer Summit – the conferene where I did my first conference talk a couple of years ago. That time it got me a first page in Computer Sweden and lots of debate around professionalism and work ethics. Nothing as controversial this time but my talk was voted best of all in the conference!

LeanSSC 2010
I was one of the very few Europeans that were able to attend the inaugural Lean SSC conference in Atlanta in April last year. Can you guess the reason? Volcano ash stopped most flights but we got lucky as the clouds opened up in the North the day before our departure and closed down the airport again only hours afterwards. The conference was really great and had the same open minded and curious practitioner focus as my first Lean and Kanban conference in London. I got to meet a lot of interesting people, made several new friends and got to hang with an awesome party crowd (thanks Pillar guys and girls). This year’s conference will be in Long Beach, Los Angeles, in May and I am going to do a practical introduction to Kanban in the Kanban track. Really looking forward to it. You should come too!

Lean Coffee Sumpan/Stockholm
Inspired by our new friend Jim Benson, author of Personal Kanban, me, colleague Peter Evjan (formerly Hultgren) and Johan Söderström founded Lean Coffee Sumpan (later moved to Stockholm) where we meet every Wednesday morning 8-9:30 to discuss all things lean and agile. Join us at Le Café, Klarabergsgatan.

Ltd WIP Society
We have had several meetings with The Limited WIP Society, e.g., an evening with show and tell of electronic tools. Next week we are going to play four simultaneous games of GetKanban. There seems to be a great interest around this since it filled up very fast.

Kanban training
I have been doing a lot of Kanban training, from short introductory stuff to full blown two day courses. Together with the coaching of several Kanban teams this has really given me many new insights and I have learned a lot from the discussions, not least from non-development teams doing digital production management, operations/incident work, advertising, etcetera.

Oredev
Many of the slides and ideas I use when I talk about Kanban are developed together with my colleague Marcus Hammarberg and we sometimes do presentations and training together. At last year’s Oredev we did an appreciated half day Kanban tutorial. It was pretty tough to satisfy all participants since they ranged from I-basically-co-invented-Kanban and agile-coach-at-ThoughtWorks-the-last-10-years to my-company-just-started-with-something-called-Scrum, but judging from the feedback forms we did really well!

Agile roll-out
In my day to day work I have among other small things been involved in an agile roll-out in a big and very well known Swedish retail company. I helped a ~300 people department develop and introduce a new development model based on lean and agile principles. I trained, coached and supported more than a dozen different Scrum and Kanban teams. Very fun and interesting work that further developed my coaching skills.

Agile Sweden (Agila Sverige)
Last year I once again helped organise Swedens number one agile conference. It was a blast as usual and I am looking forward to this year’s conference May 23-24 where I hopefully will do a lightning talk and conduct the Red Bead Experiment.

Avega Group Conference
This year we traveled to Turkey with Avega Group and had an amazing Open Space day with fantastic lightning talks from many different roles within Avega and over 50 Open Space sessions with 250 participants. The feedback was clear: “We should do this every year!” And I think we will do it again this year. But in Spain…

China, Thailand and paternity leave
Since Christmas I am on vacation and paternity leave and will be until late summer. We started out with an awesome eight week trip to Beijing and Thailand (the entire family of course). You can read more about that (in Swedish) and look at pictures and some video at http://familjensunden.wordpress.com/. Now I am home with my 10 year months young son and my two girls (when they’re not in pre-school or daycare), just taking it easy in the beautiful spring weather. So now I finally have some time to blog… ;)

I am not completely off the grid though. I have had the time to give a talk at the very nice first Agile Riga Day and, as mentioned, in Turku. I hope to be able to join some more Lean Coffee sessions, organise and attend some seminars and Limited WIP Society evenings and so on. And speak at Lean SSC 11 of course.