- Visualize Information Flow in Value Stream Mapping When I met Mary and Tom Poppendieck we not only talked about flow efficiency but about the entity that actually flows through the system. According to Mary it can only be a deriverable.
more...
- 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.
more...
- About Flows and Infinite Queues An infinite queue is a column on the Kanban board somewhere between the Queue and Live columns, one that doesn't have a WIP limit and into which one can put many work items as one wants. A column without a WIP limit sounds like a bad practice, because if there is no WIP limit what will ensure that the work items are moving - being pulled - forward.
more...
- 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.
more...
- See the Whole Flow - An Exercise for Managers to Start a Transition Last week, I got an interesting assignment from my boss.
more...
- Visualize the Flow on the Highest Possible Level I gave an internal workshop about Kanban a couple of days ago, and the colleagues who were there looked enlightened when I mentioned that Kanban should visualize the whole process, because this is the place where it can help the most. Don't get me wrong, it is also fine to have Kanban on the team level, but the real optimization and improvement should happen on the highest possible level.
more...