— value, lean, engineering disciplines …

Speaker: Andrew Webster
Meeting Date: Thursday, December 4, 2014
Time: 6:00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking; 7:00 pm sandwich dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation
Location: Sunnyvale Ramada Inn, 1217 Wildwood Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA
Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge; Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format — typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: The Seven Wastes: Could You Be A Little Leaner?

This evening, Andrew will be giving his presentation on the fascinating subject of… Waste!

He will dig into the roots of Lean and Agile thinking (the famed Toyota Production System) for a guided tour through, specifically, the seven wastes of activity.  All engineering disciplines struggle with waste, and the ability to identify hitherto unseen waste is one of the secrets to continuous improvement.  During and after the presentation, Andrew will lead an exercise that will give you something to use at work right away.  Value, the opposite of waste, is guaranteed!

Bio:
Over the last 18 years, Andrew Webster has worked in software product development in the UK, Australia, Alabama, and California.  He’s seen large and small projects both fail and succeed.  Prior to 2004, most of the work he was involved in followed either a heavyweight process or no process at all – and typically failed.  In 2004, he was introduced to Agile thinking.  This taught him to pay close attention to aligning how people work with how their work works.  This helped him to have huge success in Australia with projects in banking, heavy engineering procurement and construction, environmental engineering, and government.  In 2009, the love of a good woman brought him to America, initially to Alabama, where his wife-to-be was studying neurobiology.  There, he became a Certified Scrum Master with renowned Scrum trainers and coaches Brian Rabon and Tom Mellor.  He immediately applied his experience to the most difficult, resistant, and awkward transformation of his career: BBVA Compass’s struggling data warehouse.  His work improved the team’s effectiveness by an order of magnitude within 3 years.  His wife graduated and they moved to California in early 2013, where Andrew joined the V.Me team at Visa as a Senior Program Manager and Senior Scrum Master.  Recruited by Solutions IQ later that year, he proudly joined their team as an Agile Coach as part of the enormous Agile transformation program at PayPal, one of the largest transformation efforts on the planet.  Now well versed in the history of work and the variety of ways to approach the many disciplines within software engineering, Andrew coaches and trains for PayPal in San Jose, London, and Berlin, and is pursuing his own work as a speaker and budding author here in the Bay Area.