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Sunday, December 04, 2011

Notes from Lean workshop - Vol 1

Mary and Tom’s Leaders workshop  had been insightful, and a few thoughts are extremely radical in nature. The notes I took during the conference span a few pages, and would be sharing it here in the next couple of posts.
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Got Opportunity to have lunch with Mary, and got an opportunity to take a few pix with her during the conference.

1. Involve diverse team during any decision making process. Healthy conflict is one of the key ingredients in building a successful product

2. Having a meeting like Scrum meeting/standup every day is always useful. However, Mary recommends the Pulse Meeting model that is followed at Scania 

3. Functional requirements should be considered as unarticulated high level designs.  Reading between the lines, there is a hidden design in every functional requirement.  This is also echoed by Tom Gilb.

4. Having a Product Owner between the sponsorer and developers adds waste.  Share the vision with the developers and let developers/technical people take it from there in building the product

5. Find a way to write less code

6. 25 – 30 % Productivity can be increased by eliminating Task switching

7. I was under the impression that PDCA cycle was invented by Deming but learnt that it was Walter A Shewhart from Bell Labs

8. One should be cognizant of  applying the competency or technical leadership styles while forming the team.

9. Also, discussed  Little’s law and Queuing theory in addition to practicing few case studies of its applicability in software projects

10. Trying to utilize 100% of bandwidth reduces the pace rather than improving it. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Venkatesh do you mean context switching by task switching

Venkatesh Krishnamurthy said...

That's correct. When developers are constantly switching tasks by working on multiple things, they lose productivity. It is recommended that they take one task at a time, spend sufficient time before moving to another.