On the 12th of July I had the pleasure of hosting Clarke Ching at the Agile North East meetup which is usually held in the back of the Bunker Coffee House in Newcastle. It took a little while to arrange a date and time when Clarke would be passing through at the right time of day but the wait was definitely worth it.

Clarke presented to a full house of developers, agile coaches and managers. He talked about his book - Rolling Rocks Downhill, Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (ToC), how ToC can be applied to many problems in our lives. Once you are exposed to these ideas, you start to see queues and constraints everywhere and recognize how ToC can make things better.

Many of his points were illustrated with examples of applying ToC from Clarke's own working life.

This was a very well attended meetup for Agile North East, there was lots of lively discussion at the end over beer and pizza and the feedback I got over the following days suggested that the evening was a great success!

Sitting at the back, I was able to get some sketchnoting done, so here's how I interpreted his presentation:

Finally, just because I can't resist it, here's a pic of the very cute german shepherd puppy who shares the Bunker Coffee House with the customers and only slightly howled-like-a-wolf as it was starting to get dark outside, lending a nice spooky end to the evening.

Epilogue

Before the event, I framed the original sketchnote from his Lean Agile Scotland talk
and gave it to him on the night as a thank you for agreeing to come. Here is the photograph he tweeted of it in place in his home.