Jul 26, 2015
What We Need….
• Delivery at speed of change in our markets
• Sufficient predictability
• Alignment of efforts to maximize value to customers
Traditional Approach
Development work is:• Largely invisible• Highly variableOrganizations:• Centralize control• Fail to take an economic view• Pursue false economies of scale• Focus on people staying busy• Try to remove variability• Rely too heavily on plans• Ignore queues
Delay breeds waste!
Knowledge is perishable• Developer & analyst discuss a requirement
- A week old VS. - 3 months old
• Tester discovers a bug - A day old VS. - A month old
Quality suffers
Motivation goes down
Business opportunities get missed
Agile helps, but…
• Dev team focused (suboptimal)• Coordination and scaling challenges• Underlying principles at odds with traditional
management assumptions• Won’t solve all your problems • Can put stress on rest of organization• Focus on “velocity” can foster overload
30% capacity
60% capacity
95% capacity
Highway Throughput30% 60% 95%
Avg speed: 65 MPHThroughput: ~400 per hour
Avg speed: 65 MPHThroughput: ~800 per hour
Avg speed: 20 MPHThroughput: ~500 per hour
Highway Throughput
WSDOT Sep. 2006 Gray Book publication)
Highway Throughput
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Queues
Queue Behavior
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Queue Behavior
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Queue Behavior
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Impact of QueuesCycle time
Risk
Variability
Overhead
Feedback time
Quality
Motivation
Batch Size
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Batch Size
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Focus on Transaction Costs
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Limit WIP
Limit WIP
Cumulative Flow Diagram
Limit Your WIP
Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story , InfoQ, Feb 28, 2014http://www.infoq.com/articles/kanban-siemens-health-services#anch107610
Finding Leverage
• Stop using oversized batches• Make work visible• Focus on managing queues– Capacity utilization is hard to control– Cycle time is a trailing indicator
• Attack queues as they arise• Queues have a quantitative cost• Understand the tradeoffs
Constrain WIP at All Levels
• Epics, MMFs– Eliminate excessive early elaboration– Drop items as you add new ones
• Put WIP limits on all backlogs• Manage WIP of shared resources, experts
Take an Economic View
• Understand full value chain• Quantify cost of delay• Don’t consider $ already spent• Watch the work product, not the worker
Take an Economic View
• Influence small decisions• Quantify life-cycle profit impact of:– Product cost– Product value– Development expense– Cycle time– Risk
Manage Variability
• Standardize where it makes sense– Automated testing– Continuous integration– Continuous deployment
• Make batches roughly the same size• Include technical risk in prioritizing stories
Get Fast Feedback
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Use Cadence To…
• Limit the accumulation of variance
• Provide sufficient capacity margin to enable cadence
• Make waiting times predictable
• Enable small batch sizes
• Reduce communication costs (i.e. meetings)
Synchronization
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Synchronization
Don Reinertsen. The Principles of Product Development Flow
Summary
• Understand your economics• Make your queues visible and control them• Create a process to exploit variability• Reduce your batch size• Control cycle time by controlling WIP– Attend to delays
• Sequence work based on economics• Accelerate feedback with smaller batches• Push decision making down (where advisable)
Additional Info
• Don Reinertsen’s website (blogs & videos): http://reinertsenassociates.com
• The 175 Principles of Flow: http://lpd2.com/the-principles-of-flow/
• First chapter of the book: http://www.celeritaspublishing.com/PDFS/ReinertsenFLOWChap1.pdf
• Al Shalloway: Not Doing SAFe? No Problem. Not Doing These? Big Problem http://www.netobjectives.com/blogs/not-doing-safe-no-problem-not-doing-these-big-problem
• Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story http://www.infoq.com/articles/kanban-siemens-health-services#anch107610