Monday, October 20, 2014

Lean Kanban Central Europe 2014

Only three weeks to go before the 4th edition of Lean Kanban Central Europe takes place! Although I am not involved in the organization any more, I am still part of the Board (and proud of it). As Pawel mentioned in this blog post, we are constantly experimenting with some elements of the program. This year‘s biggest change will be that we will have dedicated tracks for different topics: Kanban, Leadership, Learning, Management, and Project Management.



I chose to organize the project management track. The reason for this is that I have met many project managers who realize that the traditional way of managing projects is not sufficient any more. With LKCE we want to show them new perspectives on project managements, provide them with new tools to experiment with and create a forum for sharing experiences with their peers.

I will kick the track off with my talk The Beauty of Problems where I will show that problems are so much more than nasty things we need to get rid of. They are great opportunities for learning and improving the system. The talk will be heavily influenced by the work of Russell Ackoff and contain some of my own experiences.
After the Pecha Kuchas (Keynote style as last year), Martin Jensen will argue that Culture is THE Competetive Advantage Martin is a smart guy with a great deal of experience with change in large enterprises like Tui.com. He is also a very entertaining speaker. If you haven‘t done already, you should definitely watch his talk from last year.




Joshua Arnold will continue with his talk Value and Urgency: The Power of Quantifying the Cost of Delay Anyone who has ever heard The Don (Don Reinertsen) talk will know a little bit about the concept of Cost of Delay. Unfortunately, few people have really first-hand experience with it. Joshua is one of them. Check out his great experience report from Maersk Line.
After his fabulous keynote from last year, Troy Magennis agreed to speak again at this year‘s edition. His topic is Risk Management and Forecasting Using Un-reliable Data Troy is the guy who not only understands statistics, but also is very capable to explain it to others and to show them how it can be used in daily work without being a statistician.
Conference days are long and it can be hard to maintain attention. Shorter talks might do the trick at the end of the day, and therefore I decided to close the track with a couple of Lightning Talks (10 minutes each). Tim Lossen will talk about the Failure Culture at Wooga, and my brother Stefan will share his experiences with participatory decision making models.


Pawel, Klaus, and Markus grabbing their well-deserved Whisky ;-)

Looking at the talks I think we‘ve managed to put together a great variety of good speakers and interesting topics. Thanks to the rest of the board: Pawel, Klaus, Wolfgang, Karl and Markus. You guys rock!

See all of you in Hamburg. If you haven‘t done yet, register today: www.lkce14.com/register


P.S. In case you wonder about this year‘s keynotes: After trying for the last three years, we finally managed to get Henrik Kniberg as well as Tom and Mary Poppendieck. No further introduction required:-) The third one will be Don Reinertsen who will speak about Robustness this year.