Taiichi Ohno is credited with the creation of the Toyota just-in-time production system, and his book “Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production” is a surprisingly good read even today when many of these principles are considered well established.
My interest was in understanding how this philosophy applies to Agile/Lean Software Development. Continue reading
You know that book on how everything important is learned in Kindergarten? Along that same line, before I got into Kindergarten, my mother taught me to that if I put my toys away, I will be able to find them again later. I am sure there was a lot of crying and whining involved, but like most people I eventually got the point.
Fast forward to the adult world. How many times have you heard these questions:
This situation is caused by the worst scourge of our time: the addiction to email. Continue reading
I could call this post “Removing the Risk from Lean Process Improvement” because it starts with the assumption that you want to improve your processes using Lean principles, but you want guidance on how to apply those principles most effectively.
Soooo much discussion of Lean last week at the Forrester Forum and the Gartner BPM Summit. Who can argue against Lean? It is after all a focus on providing more value with less waste. Lean is a focus on eliminating waste, the original sevens wastes identified by Toyota, as well as elimination of anything that does not provide value to the customer. We all want to get rid of waste and inefficiency.
How do you identify the waste in your business process? This is harder than you might think. Continue reading
There might be three distinct kinds of process support necessary:
1) System Centric Processes
2) Human Centric Processes
3) Knowledge Worker Processes Continue reading
I collect nuggets of wisdom on various topics. Recently I have been going over the topic of Agile software development; what really matters? Below is a list of 26 key principles to guide an agile software development team.
Thinking Matters 