Agile is an aggregation of many other management disciplines such as Lean Manufacturing , the Theory of Constraints and even Dr. Deming's work in Japan in Total Quality Management. One of the best tools for managing an Agile project and thus for teaching how these disciplines relate to the work done on an Agile project is the Agile Wall Chart or Story Card Wall. A Story Card Wall, similar to a Kanban Board in Lean Manufacturing, gives a snapshot of the project's status by displaying the status of each Story Card that makes up the backlog of the project.
This presentation illustrates, using an animated Agile Story Card Wall, the concepts of Lean’s Work in Progress, Drum–Buffer–Rope from Theory of Constraints and Systemic Thinking from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. The presentation, originally inspired by the MIT Beer Game, uses Flash animation to show the flow of story cards across a Story Card Wall over 10 iterations, demonstrating the effects on the team’s throughput as a result of a staffing decision made during the project. The presentation also includes an Excel spreadsheet to do ‘What If’ scenarios.
16. An Animation of One Project’s Agile Wall Lifecycle of a Story Card As a… I want to… in order to…
17. Release small batch sizes into the system Keep WIP (Work In Progress) down Short workcycles Lean Principles on the Agile Wall
18. The Drum is the constraint – it sets the pace for work all work done in the system. The Buffer protects the Drum from being starved for work. The Rope controls the release of work into the system by tying it to the constraint. ToC’s “Drum-Buffer-Rope”
19. Other Things of Interest on This Agile Wall Velocity is based on Story Cards, not Story Points. Iteration 9 is included in the plan as a contingency. Each team’s capacity (and size) was determined through several previous Iterations of adapting.
