Investors and senior managers all too often take the view that resources are fungible and easily replaced.

Asking people to change behavior is difficult!

An Economic Model for Lean W.

Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management.

Decide the outer boundaries of the kanban system. It is often best to limit this to the immediate span of political control. Do not force visualization, transparency, and WIP limits on any department that does not volunteer to collaborate.

Software engineers are apparently not supposed to have a social or family life.

When we agree to meet with friends, have drinks, dinner, and watch a movie on a Friday evening, we incur coordination costs. All the emails, text messages, and phone calls that are required to arrange a social evening are the coordination costs. So.

You need slack to enable continuous improvement. In order to have slack, you must have an unbalanced value stream with a bottleneck resource. Optimizing for utilization is not desirable.

The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically.

Of course, speed is most useful if it is in the correct direction;.