Agile Denver Kanban Community of Practice

What is a Community of Practice?
A Community of Practice develops over time, with committed members engaging in many “informal conversations” about a shared domain of interest. This creates a set of cases and stories that become a shared repertoire for their practice, whether they realize it or not. To learn a bit more about the concept of a “Community of Practice”, check out this link https://bit.ly/2YTyyZh.

What is the Agile Denver Kanban CoP?
The Agile Denver Kanban CoP is a long-running meetup that started in June of 2011. We are a “Community of Practice”, where core members, who are practitioners, have regularly engaged with each other over several years.
Our meetups generally consist of us sharing our personal experiences and stories, learning from each other more about how to apply lean thinking, lean management (leadership), and agile principles, along with pull, flow, kanban, and system thinking concepts.
Our specific focus is on how to catalyze and manage change, improve business workflow processes, and predictably forecast and answer the question “When will it be done?” We are associated with the broader Agile Denver group, which has several other “special interest groups” (SIGs) associated with it, of which we are one. And we are also connected with the U.S. and global Lean Kanban community.

Agile Denver Kanban CoP Meetup Events
Starting from 2024, we’ve updated our schedule to better accommodate our community. We host two different types of meetups: Public Meetups and Core Member Meetups.

Public Meetups
These will now be held on the 3rd Thursday of the month on a quarterly basis. Public meetups are open to everyone and feature presentations on various topics where attendees can interact, engage, and ask questions:

• January: An introduction/primer to Lean Kanban
• April: A practical session running the Featureban game online to experience and learn more about Kanban
• July: A deep dive into flow-based metrics and cumulative flow diagrams
• October: A session focused on using metrics for forecasting and estimation. We’ll discuss probabilistic forecasting and explore some tools that can assist with this.

Core Member Meetups

• These will now be held every month on the 1st Thursday.

Core Member Meetups are smaller gatherings exclusively for a limited number of active core members, designed for deeper discussions and two-way interactions.

If you’re interested in becoming a core member to engage in these smaller interactions, we encourage you to demonstrate commitment through regular attendance at our public meetups and interaction with core members in between. For more information on becoming a core member, feel free to reach out on the #leankanban channel in Agile Denver Slack, and connect with the organizers or other core members.

We look forward to seeing you at our meetups! Make sure to check back frequently for updates, posted comments and questions, and announcements as our meetup dates approach each month.

Take care,
Ed Schaefer, Trevor Peterson and John Bannister