Kanban Global Summit
San Diego 2022
Kanban Global Summit is holding out for an in person event.
Originally scheduled for spring of 2020, it was yet another causality of the pandemic year. Rescheduled for later in the year, and then pushed into 2021, we now have 2022 to look forward to.
When the time does arrive to raise a glass together, to discuss this business of getting stuff done in the knowledge-work workplace, it will be a great moment.
Services as a Mental Model
The concept of “Services” provides a mental model to explore how business objectives are transformed from ideas to experience, including how to tie those activities back to budget.
You might already have the suspicion that we’re not talking about “micro-services” or “service-oriented architecture”. Clearly, the term “service” is a very much overloaded. We need to frame the word for our purposes. Put on your “Thinking in Systems” hat, and let’s explore the idea of Services as a means of encoding and expressing strategy through design.
Service Discovery is a Puzzle
Service Discovery is a puzzle of who, what, how and why resources are afforded (budgeted) and the interaction with performances that supply outcomes.

In this talk, we’ll take you through the four components of any service: There are four types of things in every service:
- Artifacts: things with shortcomings, which are realized by Tasks.
- Events: things with shortfalls, which are realized by Access.
- Capabilities: things with skills, which are realized by Activity.
- Resources: things with surpluses, which are realized by Availability.
We’ll look at how those components form the basis of promises, and how services are constructed from promises.
For service agreements to form valid contracts, there must be an offer, a consideration, and an acceptance.
Please inquired about scheduling a Service Discovery workshop for your organization.
Edvin Johansson — "Yaizu, Shizouka, Japan"

Let's agree to define productivity in terms of throughput. We can debate the meaning of productivity in terms of additional measurements of the business value of delivered work, but as Eliyahu Goldratt pointed out in his critique of the Balanced Scorecard, there is a virtue in simplicity. Throughput doesn’t answer all our questions about business value, but it is a sufficient metric for the context of evaluating the relationship of practices with productivity.