- Flow Efficiency Last year in the Lean Kanban University conference series I was talking about flow efficiency and how we measured and used it with one of my old teams. My friend Chris McDermott asked me to write a post about it, so here it comes. Like other metrics such as cycle time, takt time, and throughput, flow efficiency comes from car manufacturing.
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- When Not to Use Swim Lanes Swim lanes on the Kanban board are really handy when different software versions have to walk through the same path or flow. However, they can be deceptive when instead of versions, different development phases have their own swim lanes. Let's say that an imaginary team decides to upgrade its Kanban system and adds the design that precedes the development phase to the board.
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- When Local Optimization Won't Make a Difference A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned at the office during my measure and manage flow in practice talk that we should invest more in optimizing the whole flow and reduce the effort spend on local optimizations. In retrospect, I didn't spend too much time on explaining why, because it had a very loose connection to the subject of the talk, and I assumed that the audience would understand what I meant anyway.
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