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Monthly Archives: May 2014

The Coolest Thing EVER! (for Lean geeks)

17 May

Lean thinking and theory of constraints have gone hand-in-hand in the agile world for as long as we’ve been stealing/borrowing ideas from the manufacturing world.  If you aren’t very familiar with how these things fit together with agile practices a good starting point is this InfoQ article (it is a little dated but still valid).

So Lean tells us we should reduce waste in our system and focus on throughput and cycle time, but doesn’t really do a good job telling us which waste to focus on first.  And that is a big-ass problem – because if we focus on a part of the system upstream of the bottleneck we can adversely affect the performance of the system by increasing WIP consequently increasing cycle-time and decreasing throughput.  Ouch!

Theory of Constraints comes to the rescue by telling you which waste to focus on first – the bottleneck!  The slowest part of your system is where you should start because, by definition, any improvement you make to the bottleneck directly impacts your cycle time and throughput.

So for years that’s where I left it when describing it to my clients and students.  The question of “How do you find the bottleneck?” never had a straight-forward answer.  That’s where you bring in the consultants or spend significant time and effort understanding and measuring your system so that you can find that all-important bottleneck.  An activity that has always seemed nebulous.

Okay – here comes the coolest part ever!  There is an insanely simple way to find the bottleneck.  Every. Single. Time.  (If I stop here it would make a great cliff-hanger wouldn’t it?)

  1. Draw/create your value stream map.  Pay special attention to identifying the queues in your system.
  2. Then, starting from the right-hand-side, traverse the VSM and find the first queue/inventory.
  3. The process to the right of that first queue from the end is your bottleneck.

Ta Da!!!!  That’s it.  Insanely simple way to find the bottleneck.  I’m sure this must have been written up somewhere before, but I’ve managed to miss this little tidbit throughout the years (and so have many of those I’ve been checking this with over the past few months).

“It can’t be THAT simple!”, I hear you exclaiming.  But think about it, if this is the very first queue from the end of the VSM, then any improvement flows directly to the user with no blockages because there are now queues downstream.

Feel free to poke holes in my theory and disprove this statement and I’ll be grateful because I will learn something along with you.  But if you can’t, isn’t this really cool?

 
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Posted by on May 17, 2014 in Lean, Organizations

 

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I’m Back – Here’s What’s on My Mind

10 May

Blogging has always been a challenge for me.  Sitting down over coffee and having a conversation…. well that’s really natural and I do that effortlessly.  I’m not there yet with writing.  So, here we go again.

I write this blog sitting in the KLM lounge at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam on my way to Beijing (yeah, being a consultant definitely has its up-sides).  There are a few topics I’ve stored up in the months since I’ve written my last blog, and I’ll be writing about them soon:

  • Fixed price contracts and agile methods,
  • Creating a culture of safety,
  • The importance of integrity,
  • A 9-week bootcamp program for creating high performance teams,
  • Programming for old farts,
  • Whatever I learn at the XP conference in a couple of weeks,
  • The awesome-est way to locate the bottleneck in your system,
  • Playing world of warcraft with my 6-year old daughter,
  • The state of Agile in Egypt,
  • Lean start-ups,
  • The Culture Engine – the book and it’s progress,

Now I’ll leave you with something really cool I recently read that I hope you find as useful as I have.  But first a little background: I cringe whenever I hear the word “measurements”.  I have flashes of huge excel spreadsheets, entering the number of minutes I’ve been working on a particular task, and a stochastics final back in college.  So, it is with great hesitance that I picked up a book on measurements on a recommendation from my good friend Ruud.

So far it is an interesting read.  The author starts out giving some stories of some pretty remarkable measurements that were very light-weight but clever (for example Eratosthenes approximating the circumference of the earth from shadows and the distance between my hometown (Alexandria) and Aswan).  And here is the gold nugget:

If you take a sample of 5 people in your organization and ask them the same question, then the median of your entire population is within the interval represented by the largest and smallest numbers in your sample with 93% confidence.

Here is what it means practically for me:

If I have a question, such as, “how much time do we spend on defects every week”, I can ask 5 developers at random in my organization and they answer 5 hours, 10 hours, 30 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours then we know a huge amount.  We know the median lies between 4hrs and 30hrs with 93% confidence.  I don’t know about you – but that is amazing!  And that little rule will allow me to be able to have some really great discussions with my teams and clients.

– Amr

 
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Posted by on May 10, 2014 in Uncategorized