"The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same
level of thinking we were at when we created them." - Albert Einstein

Are you involved in the development of websites?

Do you find it a frustrating experience? Do you find that you and your teammates are always frantically busy? Do you find that, even though you work so hard, your customers are often dissatisfied with the service you provide?

What is Lean?

Lean is the name given to a set of approaches to management used by the Toyota Motor Company which have made them the biggest (and arguably the most succesful) car company in the world. Lean methods are a radically different approach to managing difficult and complex technical and creative tasks. If adopted and adapted these approaches offer the possibility to transform web development.

Who should do this course?

Anyone who is involved in developing websites for a living. Especially, producers, project managers and developers. If you are involved in the commissioning and procurement of web sites, this course will also be useful to you.

What will you get from this course?

Using the Lean concept of Value, this course will help you develop and understanding of what is valuable to the customer in the web development work you do.

Using the concept of Flow, will help you understand how to make web development work flow through your team so that it is delivered to your customer, and you are paid, and on to the next job more quickly.

The concept of Poka Yoke – Mistake Proofing, will also will help you "mistake-proof" your web development team - by focusing on changes in process that completely and forever prevent preventable mistakes.

Finally, through asking the most powerful question in the Lean approach – "What is it?" the course will identify those problems which are absolutely unique to web development and identify ways to tackle them and identify powerful ways of addressing these problems which will allow you to increase your control of even the most chaotic situations.

Course Outline
Value

• What are your values?

• What are your customers' values?

• How do values change through the course of a project?

Flow

• Helping value to flow through the team

• Dealing with the major causes of disruption

  • Late arrival of assets

  • Late sign-off

  • Client unavailability
    

Poka Yoke – Mistake Proofing

• Understanding Failure Demand

• Ironing out preventable mistakes

• Test Driven Development

What is it?

• What are the unique problems of web development

• Increasing control without ruining creativity

About the tutor: Mark Stringer specialises in teaching project management methods to the web development community. He has been involved in software development since 1993 and web development since 1997. He has worked for small start-up web development companies as well as working on innovative applications of web technologies for large corporations such as Xerox. He has taught at both Cambridge and Sussex Universities.