Don’t we all think that we get more done if we stay busy? We feel good and efficient. We may even get a pat on the back or even a promotion.
But is this good for the company? Is it good for our customers? Are we really optimizing for the whole or are we just keeping ourselves busy?
Theory of Constraints
Waste of overproduction > waste of highly skilled people idling? – #Agile2014 Q&A part 2
This is my second Q&A post for my #Agile2014 session: How to improve Flow Efficiency, Remove the Red bricks! In this, my previous and upcoming posts I will answer some of the questions I have received as session feedback after the session.
Q2: The presentation gave a full demonstration of the issue and how to address the problem. However the only issue I had with it is that it is essentially teaching to have your highly skilled, highly paid people sit and wait for work when it is ready. I would like to see the real metrics when you consider the overhead of these highly skilled people. But in general, I think you did a really good job of pointing out the issue and ways to address it. Entertaining presentation as well.
Yes, I am proposing that for some organizations, based on their context, it is a valid business/operational strategy to focus more on having the flow units (e.g. user stories, features, MVP, project) being worked on all the time over having our highly skilled, highly paid people utilized all the time.
How to improve Flow Efficiency with Scrum – #Agile2014 Q&A
Thank you all of you who attended my #Agile2014 session: How to improve Flow Efficiency, Remove the Red bricks! In this, and upcoming posts (part 2) I will answer some of the questions I have received after the session.
Q1: I was hoping to better understand how to improve flow efficiency when the number of resources varies on our scrum process. For example, we have more developers than testers. We typically have a bottleneck in the test step. Not sure I got my answer.
This question is not necessarily a flow efficiency question. It may be more of a balance demand to capacity question. Nevertheless, let us explore the flow efficiency side first, as this was the main focus of the session. First, a short description of flow efficiency.
Hakan Forss's Blog 