Posts Tagged ‘Theory of Constraints’
Agile retrospectives – Cause and effect
Thanks to Rachel Davies for sharing her approach to constructing a diagram of effects.
Rachel proposes that the diagram of effects can trigger a team to discuss how a variety of issues relate and goes on to highlight advice from Bas Vodde and Craig Larman in their first book “Scaling Lean and Agile Development”, the First Law of Diagramming is “The primary value in diagrams is in the discussion while diagramming—we model to have a conversation.”
I have been using a slightly different approach in retrospectives recently. With a similar intent to Rachel I hope to trigger conversations that result in a team sharing there concerns and issues and coming to a shared view as to how these relate and where would be a good point for intervention.
Theory of constraints for beginners
Take-away #3 from David Anderson’s Kanban Coaching workshop.
A discussion of Kanban can only go on for so long before the subject of the Theory of Constraints comes up. In this post I’ll try to explain just enough to show this connection.
Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a large subject that I was first introduced to some time ago by Pascal Van Cauwenberghe and his explanation of the 5 focusing steps for process improvement. Since then I’ve seen TOC pop up at a few Agile conferences. The most notable aspects that tend to be discussed are the 5 focusing steps mentioned earlier and the TOC thinking tools. The Thinking tools offer techniques for root cause analysis, problems solving, conflict resolution and planning. While there have been a number of books explaining these techniques the source material is a set of novels written by Eliyahu Goldratt the first being The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
David’s first book (Agile Management for Software Engineering
At this stage I should say that where David has applied TOC he has subsequently realised that a Kanban approach would have led to an equivalent result and is a conceptually more simple approach.
The areas of TOC that David chose to focus on were the classification of bottlenecks and the application of Goldratt’s 5 focusing steps. more »
