The document discusses how an overemphasis on metrics and utilization can constrain the flow of value in organizations. It argues that relentlessly pursuing productivity optimizes for busyness rather than delivering value to customers. Alternatives presented include focusing on flow over waste, value over flow, and incorporating variability buffers, learning, and innovation. The document cautions against practices like absorbing failure demand through "dumpster teams" and overloaded bottlenecks, which can hide problems and lead to exponential delays.
7. Discuss how the relentless pursuit of
productivity is constraining our ability to
effectively deliver value to our customers and
businesses.
Discuss some alternatives to this approach of
optimizing for busyness.
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28. Excessive Work in Progress (WIP) is the enemy of
flow. By setting limits to work in progress we can
enable greater flow.
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31. Traditional management thinking treats all
demand as equal. There is work to be done
and people who do the work. Failure Demand
is demand that originates from a failure to
have done something right in the first place.
Not all productivity is desirable.
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33. Agile team produces growing velocity but, as
they speed features out the door, bugs are
introduced. When bugs come into the
backlog they’re assigned velocity points. It is
theoretically possible, therefore, to have a
team producing zero value demand while
increasing velocity fixing bugs.
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36. In order to keep developers typing at maximum
utilization, we create teams to absorb the failure
demand caused by developers typing at maximum
utilization. These teams often have unlimited WIP and
must consume an unending stream of demand. This
also hides the problems from the people
creating them.
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54. In general, reliability is the ability of a person or system to perform
and maintain its functions in routine circumstances as well as in
hostile or unexpected circumstances. In the case of emergency
services, reliability looks at actual incident history data to measure
historical performance in accordance with adopted performance
measures.
A unit unavailable for response provides no service to the community.
The unit may be out of service for a multitude of reasons including;
another emergency response, training, maintenance, etc. If a unit is
not available 80% of the time, it is not reasonable to expect the unit to
perform at the 80th percentile.
…. Poor availability negatively influences response times.
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65. “Limiting our work in progress so we focused on
completion was a big deal for us. It felt better to have
1 story than 5 tasks in progress.”
–Lead Developer
“Development was very helpful with testing,
volunteering to clear impediments and helping us
test during the sprint.” –Lead Tester
“The team is excited and helping each other out
during stand-up and working together in the War
Room” –PM/SM
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