To survive in a fast changing environment, we need to continuously improve productivity, reduce rework, and optimize product strategies. Lean development and lean management offer the right ingredients: Eliminating waste, empowering teams, delivering as fast as possible, seeing the whole. But there is a dark side, as recent industry experiences show. Too lean is mean. Lean often fails due to lack of vision, organizational misalignment and insufficient execution. One of the main sources of failure is trying to make a too big step in the ways of working at once. Therefore, the change to lean has to be done in a continuous and incremental way. This keynote will introduce to lean principles and practices in software organizations. It will draw upon experiences from a variety of industries with topics such as lean transition, introducing new tools, improving engineering performance, and setting up a global software organization. Specifically the keynote will highlight how to measure performance and thus to arrive at a more lean software process over time.

Dr. Christof Ebert is managing director and partner at Vector Consulting Services. He is helping clients worldwide to improve product development and product strategy and to manage organizational changes. Prior to that, he held engineering and management positions for fifteen years in IT, transportation and aerospace. An internationally renowned keynote speaker, SEI certified CMMI Instructor, area editor of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge and steering chair of the IEEE conference series on Global Software Engineering, he teaches at the University of Stuttgart and authored several books including his most recent book "Global Software Engineering" published by Wiley/IEEE in 2010. Contact him at christof.ebert@vector.com