The Corbis Kanban Presentation was delivered at don-reinertsen's Lean New Product Development conference in Chicago in June 2007. With approximately 55 attendees — including Mary Poppendieck — it was the first public presentation of the complete kanban-method, including classes-of-service and lead time metrics derived from the corbis-kanban-experiment.
Historical significance
This presentation marks the beginning of the community-building-era: the point at which Anderson's work at corbis moved from a private experiment into the public domain. The Lean New Product Development conference, organized by don-reinertsen, was the natural venue: Anderson had drawn heavily on Reinertsen's queueing theory in developing the Kanban system at Corbis, and Reinertsen's community of product development flow practitioners was the intellectual context most prepared to receive it.
The 55-person audience was small by conference standards but included practitioners whose subsequent work would prove significant. Mary Poppendieck's presence connected the presentation to the lean software development community she had helped build through the Poppendiecks' books. The reception at this conference shaped how Anderson framed the Kanban Method for the broader Agile community in subsequent years.
Content
The presentation showed the complete Kanban system that had been operating at corbis under Anderson's direction, with dragos-dumitriu and rick-garber. It included:
The classes-of-service concept — categorizing work items by their cost-of-delay profiles into expedite, fixed-date, standard, and intangible categories — appeared here for the first time in a public presentation. This concept would become one of the Kanban Method's most distinctive contributions, distinguishing it from simple visual management and connecting it explicitly to don-reinertsen's economic analysis of scheduling decisions.
Path to the Kanban book
The Corbis presentation was the first step in the path from experiment to codification that led to the kanban-book (2010). Anderson continued presenting the Kanban Method at conferences through 2007 and 2008 — including the kanban-alternative-path-to-agility talk — building the community and refining the concepts that would be systematized in the book. The first-lean-kanban-conference followed as the community grew around the emerging method.