Taiichi Ohno Reinterpreted

Taiichi Ohno is credited with the creation of the Toyota just-in-time production system, and his book “Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production”  is a surprisingly good read even today when many of these principles are considered well established.

My interest was in understanding how this philosophy applies to Agile/Lean Software Development. 

Putting Your Toys Away

You know that book on how everything important is learned in Kindergarten?  Along that same line, before I got into Kindergarten, my mother taught me to that if I put my toys away, I will be able to find them again later.  I am sure there was a lot of crying and whining involved, but like most people I eventually got the point.

Fast forward to the adult world.  How many times have you heard these questions:

• Where is the latest spreadsheet?
• Does this document have the latest changes in it?
• Are your changes in this document?
• Can you send the copy of the file that contains all the latest updates?

This situation is caused by the worst scourge of our time: the addiction to email. 

Process Improvement: Informed & Lean

I could call this post “Removing the Risk from Lean Process Improvement” because it starts with the assumption that you want to improve your processes using Lean principles, but you want guidance on how to apply those principles most effectively.

Soooo much discussion of Lean last week at the Forrester Forum and the Gartner BPM Summit.  Who can argue against Lean?  It is after all a focus on providing more value with less waste.  Lean is a focus on eliminating waste, the original sevens wastes identified by Toyota, as well as elimination of anything that does not provide value to the customer.  We all want to get rid of waste and inefficiency.

How do you identify the waste in your business process? This is harder than you might think. 

Human BPM vs. Case Management, Summit Nov 3

There might be three distinct kinds of process support necessary:

1) System Centric Processes
2) Human Centric Processes
3) Knowledge Worker Processes

26 Hints for Agile Software Development

I collect nuggets of wisdom on various topics. Recently I have been going over the topic of Agile software development; what really matters?  Below is a list of 26 key principles to guide an agile software development team.

• Get case 1 fully working before starting case 2. Another way of saying this to use a kitchen metaphor is: “Serve the current meal before starting to cook the next“. 

Process Reification

John Evdemon makes an informative post about the  Zachman Framework and end up on a discussion of  “process reification” which he explains is the action of converting an abstract process into a concrete, executable process.  Such a conversion is often touted as the Holy Grail of BPM.  While such a conversion is often desired, I would remind the reader that it might be better not to convert in the first place:  A Model Preserving Strategy assures that the designer creates an executable model in the first place, and that the model executed is always what the designer drew.

JP Morganthal makes an important post reminding us to Keep Your SOA and BPM Initiatives Separate. 

What is Case Management?

So much discussion recently about Case Management, but do we really know what we mean?  Let me collect here some definitions, and then offer my own.

The Case Management Society of America, a health care oriented professional group, defines case management as:

Notes from Keynote at Agile 2009

Find the complete talk, audio/video by Alistair Cockburn with slides on the InfoQ site. I am spending a lot of time on Agile Software Development techniques, and this talk presents a number of important concepts, so I am posting my notes here to help others looking for good materials on Agile software engineering.

A New Kind of Spam @ Linked-In Groups

I will warn you, this is not a particularly interesting article — I just needed a place to record the results of some detective work.

I am a member of a number of “Groups” on “Linked-In”, one if particular:  Business Process Management Professionals Group.  I will be leaving that group unless something can be done about a particular type of spam.  There are these email notices that get sent about interesting articles that members link to.  But there is a problem. 

Got iPhone; still have MP3 player

I recently got an iPhone.  Cool piece of hardware and a lovely system design.  I was hoping that finally I could carry a single device for phone and podcasts, but what a disappointment!

There is a particular podcast that I like.  It is about 50 minutes long, and I have a 25 minute commute each direction.  The show appears on the web site about 2pm every day.  Sometime around 4pm I download the podcast