This presentation was given at the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2012 (LSSC12).

Lean/Agile is not just about delivering early and often, it is even more importantly about continuously adapting the way we work towards an improved capability of delivery. Yet how many of us have worked in a continuously improving organization? How many of us have seen one in real life?

It’s hard to keep management interested in Improvement for very long, making Continuous Improvement a holy grail of sorts. As Lean/Kanban practitioners we believe the only sustainable way to improve is via evolutionary emerging change. But if we the organization is not interested in pursuing it, we have a big problem.

Through some challenging situations from real client work we will see a few patterns that fail and a few patterns that show more promise for energizing improvement. We will also look at improvement pace and how to apply kanban approaches to make the improvement more sustainable.

We will also explore some local cultural aspects that might affect the drive (or lack of) towards improvement, and how to deal with them, with some interesting insights about the Israeli culture…