one piece flow
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
One-piece flow
•How a high-level view of the process
flow can improve productivity, enable
agility and reduce the effects of hand-
offs
•Silviu Eigel
•10/20/2011
2
Why are we here?
• Architect
• Manage
• Analyze
• Develop
• Test
• Support
Not true reasons True reasons
• Provide value to the customer
• Ship products and deliver value
3
Illusion in corporate enterprise
• Jobs descriptions: "...ability to multi-task"
• Lack of ability to focus
• High productivity -> people need to be busy
• Working on almost the most important tasks
• Windowing operating systems made it ok
• "I'm productive because I'm keeping busy“
• Organization can be more Agile by having lots of projects in flight
• We must move resources around
• Assign people to multiple projects
• Silos of subject matter experts
• "The hand-off organization"
• Little or no visibility on capacity or impacts of waste
• Hides wasteful activities and delays
4
DemoOne-piece flow vs. Mass production
• One-piece flow vs. Mass production
• Mass production
• Waste
• Work in process - inventory
• Defects
• Chaos
• Customer continues to wait
• More WIP
• One-piece flow
• calm
• in control
• problems can't hide
5
10 tasks story
6
How can we provide value?
• Continuous improvement
• Agile development ensures value is continuing to be
maximized throughout the development process
• Deliver working software early and often
• Agile development accelerates the delivery of initial
business value
• Adaptation
• Iterative planning and feedback loops align the delivered
software with desired business needs
• Visibility
• Sustainability
• It is all about feedback
7
Cycle time
• Time between
• Starting detailed specification of a feature
• Having that feature completed.
• The shorter you make the time between concept and completion, the more roadblocks you face that have little
to do with actual engineering. Fixing those problems unleashes productivity.
• Cleaning up a large bug backlog before release can really slow down cycle time.
• Demands immediate bug fixes.
• Enables fast feedback loops and constant improvement.
8
Inventory – Uncompleted features
• Mary: In software development inventory is anything that you’ve started and you haven’t gotten done. It’s
“partially done” work. … If you started developing something and it’s not done, it is inventory. … You want to go
from understanding what you’re supposed to do to having it done and deployed and in somebody’s hands as
rapidly as possible.
• Having too much work in progress adds to the waste of the system
• Makes it harder to detect and fix problems
• Hides your manufacturing issues.
9
Little’s LawQueuing theory
• Inventory = Throughput × Flow Time(cycle time)
• Fundamental and simple
• Relates 3 critical performance measures of any production system
• Much deeper
• it applies to single stations, production lines, factories, supply chains
• it applies to systems w/ or w/o variability
• it applies to non-production systems where inventory represents people
• Average Completion Rate = Things-in-Process/Throughput
10
DemoDots Game
11
Conclusions
• Distractions and task shifting reduce individual efficiency with 20% for each interruption
• Cycle time increases and predictability decreases as larger pieces of work are loaded into the system
• Bottlenecks
• People doing work in front of a bottleneck that adds to the queue of the bottleneck are actually causing
problems.
• If there is no productive work you can do
• It is better to do something outside of the value stream
• Reducing them
• Best way to ensure focus at all levels in the organization
