Free (and Nearly Free) Stuff!

Agile Lab is giving away free stuff.

Here's the situation.  The more that I've read about Lean, Kanban and Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System, the more convinced I've become that there's a way of using these ideas to create a web development agency that would be massively more efficient and productive than most of the ones that I've seen, even ones that have adopted Agile methods as fully as they possibly can.

But my ideas aren't properly developed yet.  I'm reading everything I can about Lean and Kanban.  I'm talking to people who are doing this stuff inside their organisations. I'm listening carefully to the war stories of others who are trying to introduce Lean ideas.  Trouble is, experiences of Lean inside a web development agency are few and far between.  Most case studies seem to come exclusively from large organisations who are developing large stand-alone software projects albeit with some kind of web front-end.  Nobody seems to have done this yet with a 'typical' web development agency that builds lots of web sites that don't just involve software, but also combine design, marketing and PR.  This seems to me a great pity, because I think this might just be where Lean ideas could be most powerfully effective.

Over the two years that Agile Lab has been running, its area of expertise and focus has been on web development agencies.  I want to work with them to understand how Lean ideas can be made to work in a small web development agency that typically has several small projects on the go and short turn-around times.

I don't think anybody has successfully applied Lean, Kanban and other Toyota Production System methods to this kind of web development.

I want to be one of the first, and I want to get there in the most professional way possible.  For me, that means without using paying customers as guinea pigs. In order to do that, I'm prepared to give away considerable chunks of

FREE

yes, that's

FREE

consultancy, to any web development company that's prepared to come with me on this journey and allow me to use details of the experience as case study material.

What's in it for you?  You get to explore the way your company works.  You get the benefits that come with bringing in an outside consultant: someone who helps you step back from your day-to-day concerns and works with you to make your company the best it can be. You also get to experiment with the ideas that made Toyota the worlds biggest and most successful car company. Ideas that hold out the possibility of allowing you to "perfect" web development in the way they other companies like Porsche have used Lean to perfect car manufacture.

Oh - did I mention the course!  Gah! I can't believe I forgot about the course!  On the 14th October 2009 at the Watershed in Bristol I'll be running a workshop course on:

Lean Approaches to agency Web Development

The idea is that I talk through the basics concepts of a Lean approach: why anybody who does web development should take any notice of a car company? Then we'll do a bunch of workshop activities to explore these ideas, this will almost certainly include a value stream mapping exercise and an exercise to demonstrate the importance of even, continuous flow. Maybe some other stuff- not sure yet.

This course isn't FREE - but it is available to you for the stunning bargain price of £50 which will just about cover my expenses and make sure people turn up.

Contact me now if you're interested in signing up.

Especially if you bring along several members of your team

For further information, contact mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)