The Scaling Dilemma - Mary & Tom Poppendieck are Back!

Mary & Tom Poppendieck are back in Perth and have agreed to give their YOW! talk - The Scalling Dilemma.
Come along to be what is going to be one of the best Meetups this year!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “We used to be small. We made great decisions, got product to the market fast, and were very successful. Now we are big. And slow. Our teams don’t work together very well. Our specialists are spread too thin. Our products are less than awesome.”

Getting teams to work well is hard. Getting teams to work well together is much harder. And the dilemma is, what works in a small organization is often counterproductive at scale. The question is – what do you have to do differently when you grow up?

For starters, scaling is fundamentally a complexity problem, so you should look for ways to reduce and deal with complexity. Second, scaling is a cooperation problem, and understanding what promotes and what destroys cooperation is essential for growing organizations.

Finally, scaling is an organizational problem, and there’s no shortage of models to study for patterns of how to scale organizations. There’s the lean model, the military model, and several unicorn models. These models confirm the fact that scale is possible, and are full of ideas for you to experiment. But they won’t tell you which approach is best for you – you have to figure that out for yourself.

Brought to you by Agile Perth and YOW! Nights
Program
5:30pm Welcome networking with refreshments
6:00pm Presentation followed by Q&A
7:30pm Networking refreshments and close

About The Presenters
Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed software development, supply chain management, manufacturing operations, and new product development. She spearheaded the implementation of a Just-in-Time system in a 3M video tape manufacturing plant and led new product development teams, commercializing products ranging from digital controllers to 3M Light Fiber™.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck are popular writers and speakers, and authors of the book Lean Software Development, which was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. A sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development, was published in 2006,and Leading Lean Software Development in 2009. A forth book, The Lean Mindset, was published in 2013.