Monday, August 9, 2010
If you're estimating, know why you're estimating
Posted by Simon Baker
Estimates are lies and estimating is waste. That doesn't necessarily mean it can't sometimes be useful. It's still waste but used at appropriate times, in appropriate ways, and understanding the flaws in the results it can help things along with business and finance people and clients. People just have to realize that it's just not possible to be any good at estimation. The best you can hope for, and certainly what you should aim for if you have to do it, is consistency rather than accuracy. If you're always consistently over or consistently under that's enough for reasonable planning.
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Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Driving continuous improvement with PDCA and measurements
Posted by Simon Baker
Continuous improvement has always been an implicit part of being agile and with the growing awareness of work by Deming, amongst others, plus the increasing popularity of Lean thinking, it is rightly becoming the center of attention. And yet, I suspect much of the continuous improvement that happens may or may not be actual improvement. I wonder if most of it proves to be negligible in the grand scheme of things.
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Saturday, April 24, 2010
You should probably watch this, if you haven't already
Posted by Simon Baker
Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv
Comments: 1
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
HTTP Caching in Grails at GGUG
Posted by Simon Baker
At GGUG on Monday 19th April, Gus talked about how to effectively use HTTP caching in Grails applications. See the video and slides.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Dealing with organizational complexity goes in the 'too hard' box
Posted by Simon Baker
Our purpose is to improve the quality of service for customers. Quite simply, our goal is to delight customers. But Goldratt said: The goal of every company is to make money. Making money is mandatory but fixation on profit and obsession with costs is a sure way to become detached from customers. Our goal is not do delight shareholders. Delighted customers become loyal customers and loyal customers provide repeat business. They even do marketing for us. They tell their friends and family who then give us their business and they’re delighted so they tell their friends and family.
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Thursday, March 18, 2010
Come and see us at LSSC10 in Atlanta on 21st April
Posted by Simon Baker
Come and hear us talk at Lean Software and Systems Conference, Atlanta. Our session is at 2:30pm on Wednesday 21st April in the Business and Management track. We'll be talking about Product Development in the Land of the Free.
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Sunday, March 7, 2010
Come and see us at QCon London on 11th March
Posted by Simon Baker
Come and hear us talk at QCon London. Our session is at 3pm on Thursday 11th March in the Agile Evolution track. We'll be talking about Product Development in the Land of the Free.
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Comments: 2
Effectiveness of a real product stream
Posted by Simon Baker
I've pulled together some data for the first year of a product stream we created and plotted it as charts for throughput, rework and effectiveness.
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Friday, March 5, 2010
Visual Hospital
Posted by Simon Baker
We've been working with the boys from Visual Healthcare Solutions (who are faculty members at the Lean Enterprise Academy to create a touchscreen solution called Visual Hospital, which supports the methods they talk about in their book Making Hospitals Work. It's been a lot of fun using an iterative approach to building the interaction design with the users.
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Friday, February 26, 2010
Inevitable and avoidable rework
Posted by Simon Baker
Without really thinking about it until now, I've been seeing two types of technical debt. The first is the quick solution implemented with dirty code. I consider this to be irresponsible. That's not to say I won't do it, just that if I decide I should do it I make sure the necessary people understand the consequences and that it's an irresponsible action to take.
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Comments: 3
