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A user interface (UI) developer named Dwayne Johnson recognized the value in delivering small changes frequently and began socializing the idea of making small improvements on a consistent schedule.
TOC is a way to identify the most important limiting factor (the constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor.
Feature Driven Development, a type of Agile development focused on cross-functional, collaborative, and time-boxed activities to build features.
“The Secret History of Kanban,” David’s methods “...eliminated explicit estimation from the process, and relied on data to provide a probabilistic means of determining when software was likely to be done.”
Learning what to measure changed my world.
it became obvious the work spent more time in wait states than in work states.
And while we waited, we started something new, because, you know, with resource utilization as a goal, you have to stay busy all the time.
Ask people at a social gathering how they are and the stock answer is ‘super busy,’ ‘crazy busy’ or ‘insanely busy.’
busyness does not equate to growth or improvement or value.
It’s hard to manage invisible work. With invisible work, we don’t notice the explicit reminders that our mental budget is already full. There is no time to simply think.
All it takes is a shift from haphazardly saying yes to everything to deliberately saying yes to only the most important thing at that time. And to do it visually.
The solution is to design and use a workflow system that does the following five things: Make work visible. Limit work-in-progress (WIP). Measure and manage the flow of work. Prioritize effectively (this one may be a challenge, but stay with me—I’ll show you how). Make adjustments based on learnings from feedback and metrics.
As Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
Once we scrutinize the crimes committed against your existing workload, we can proceed with the insight and awareness necessary to do something about it.
Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. —Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window
Kanban is Japanese for signal card—a card that, very simply, signals your availability to do some work.
When you say to your pal, “Yes, I’ll do that,” you have just authorized and prioritized “that” request over all the other requests in the backlog.
It’s a thief stealing time away from previous requests and is one reason why requests in the backlog take so long (and sometimes never make it) to the In Progress state.
It’s very expensive when teams are unaware of mutually critical information. This is the type of thing that happens when there are unknown dependencies.
This is the problem with unplanned work—it sets back planned work. It increases uncertainty in the system and makes the system less predictable as a result.
A major value of the Agile movement is to encourage responding to change over following a plan. Life is uncertain. Change is inevitable.
“All hands on deck” incidents tend to reduce performance and increase variability.
Longer cycle times delay the opportunity to receive vital feedback from customers about our work, which in turn creates a crevice for more thievery to sneak in.
“Many things may be important, but only one can be the most important.”
Old software in itself is not a problem. Old software that is not maintained and is not part of an automated build, test, and deploy process is a problem.
The entropy of an isolated system always increases over time. If not repaired or replaced, the system eventually bombs, blocking or delaying something important. This
Work is neglected when people are “busy.” Busy people, however, do not signal productivity—delivered value does.
Purging low-value jobs from the work queue makes sense whenever a surplus of high-value jobs is in progress.
things that matter most must not be sidetracked by the things that matter least.
Making work visible is one of the most fundamental things we can do to improve our work because the human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision.
Thus, it makes sense that when we can’t see our work, we have a hard time managing it.
two-thirds of the population are visual-spatial learners.
A ten-minute task probably doesn’t need to be tracked unless one of the following is true:
Identifying team pain is a portion of the Demand Analysis
(Thief Conflicting Priorities, at your service): Too many interruptions—I can’t get work done. Conflicting priorities—everything is priority a one.
When people participate in creating something, they have ownership, which motivates them to invest in solving problems and achieving desired outcomes.
The first reason is pretty basic: as team players, we don’t want to let our tribe down, and as mentioned before, we get endorphins from saying yes. The second reason is fear of public humiliation or of getting fired.
people are optimistic creatures, which leads us to think we can finish tasks faster than we actually do.
start-ing something new and shiny is more fun than doing the grunt work it takes to finish something old and unglamorous.
Thief Too Much WIP is the ringleader of all the other thieves.
Because Thief Too Much WIP scatters our atten-tion across multiple things, it steals our time, our money, and our ability to deliver high quality work.
Swimlanes are lanes dedicated for a particular kind of work to flow through.
It’s the WIP limits that create the necessary tension in the system. They give permission for people to say, “No, I can’t take that on right now; my plate is full.” They are the constraint that enables the completion of work.
Silver bullets may well be worth the cost, so to these we say, “We know this is important, and we’ll do it, but you only get one of these at a time.”
It’s easier to juggle three balls than five balls, and in the business world, it’s easier to finish something and get it delivered and off your plate when there are fewer things to focus on.
WIP limits create the necessary tension in the system. They are the constraint that enables people to complete work.
by the time invisible dependencies are reported, you are already in deep water.
The hardest thing we do is communicate across teams.
When the coordination cost between teams is high, people aren’t available when you need them to be—and
The idea of using cross-functional team stand-ups to flag dependencies was quickly abandoned because it was impractical, if not impossible, for groups of impacted people to attend numerous daily team stand-ups.
