I wrote in my previous post that I wasn’t done yet with my LSSC’12 conference report, but I haven’t blogged in a while and it has been more than two months since the conference ended, so I guess I was done. So, this post is going to be a quick wrap-up of what I haven’t written in my previous blog posts about this conference. And those posts can be found here, here, and here.

Lean Coffee

Lean coffee is becoming increasingly popular at conferences and it was a must-do at the main lean software development conference, of course. Lean coffee is a way to moderate a meeting using a Personal Kanban board. The basic form of a lean coffee kanban board is: ready – talking about (WIP limit 1) – done. There are some nuances to moderating a lean-coffee meeting, but I’ll talk about them in a separate blog spot.

Anyway, if you showed up in the LSSC’12 cafeteria at 7:30am, one hour before the daily announcements and the keynote, you had a chance to participate in great discussions with some of the leading Lean thinkers and practitioners. By the third day of the conference, Lean Coffee expanded to four tables.

Lightning and Ignite Talks

Each day of the conference program allocated half-hour to six five-minute lighting or ignite talks, eighteen such talks throughout the conference. Four of the eighteen speakers were Canadian and they all hit the ball out of the park. All chose one point or story to talk about, didn’t speak too fast, trying to cram as much as possible into five minutes, and thus made their talks very clear. These four speakers were:

• Gerry Kirk, who spoke about using Agile techniques in civic engagement.
• Charan Atreya, who told a story about a Chinese restaurant where few waiters served a large number of customers in a very short amount of time and how he went where customers usually don’t go to learn about their lean kitchen.
• Taimur Mohammad spoke from the Deloitte experience in Lean Startup for Change and gave the gist of it to those how missed Jeff Anderson’s Lean Startup for Change session
• Alexis Hui spoke about a marketplace of IT projects and how the capacity and not the money is the scarce currency that can make it work.

There were also memorable talks by Liz Keogh about complexity and The Rhythm of the Board brought from Italy by Gaetano Mazzanti – a Kanban board that plays music as cards move across it so that you can hear, not only see important patterns.

There were also great keynotes, extending the trend of inviting speakers from outside IT and software development to challenge the audience with ideas from their fields. I cannot possibly cover everything in my blog spots, so I’ll end this post with a number of useful references:

• Collection of LSSC’12 videos on Vimeo. Most of the talks have been posted.
• The conference program
• The conference proceedings, where you can find additional insights on certain topics that go beyond what the speakers could get into their allocated time.