lean prod development productcamp vancouver feb15

Joe Lukan

joelukan@gmail.com@joelukan

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