A couple of weeks ago I attended an interesting conference. One of the speakers told the story of how the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London had reduced the number of mistakes during surgery and the following handoff between different hospital units. While watching a Formula One race on TV two doctors were inspired - Could standardized choreography used by pit stop teams in Formula One be used to reduce the number of mistakes when transferring patients in hospitals? The short answer -- yes. I suggest you read the full article on learning from Formula One here: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06318/738252-114.stm

The story made me wonder. If hospitals can improve safety and speed by learning from Formula One teams, could the software industry do the same? I realize we don't really have the same degree of physical movement that other industries have - but there is something more to that story. I think what it really shows, is that if you foster an environment of process innovation, and strives for excellence in safety and speed, magic can actually happen

I did some Google-based research and found out that in NASCAR racing, teams have gone from 16 seconds pit stops being good, to 12-13 seconds pit stops being what is expected, during a 10 year period. That is a pretty significant improvement. I think it is quite likely that 10 years from now, the software industry can look back and witness similar improvements - primarily based on the Agile/Lean transformations that are taking place right now.

I think everyone wishes to be part of a team that pushes the limit of what is possible in their domain -- I know I do

By Sune Gynthersen

A task board has been used by many teams when doing Agile development to have a shared place to manage tasks in the iteration.  I have used it myself in a lot of different formats when working with R&D development, customer projects and also working together with offshore teams.

It can be a great tool for the team and creates more collaboration, feedback and risk mitigation when having a visible task board.

But, you might also have more frequent requests from other teams or customers and maybe you also work with maintenance tasks of existing products in production. It can be challenging to combine focus in the iteration with different ongoing requests.

One alternative approach to the traditional task board and iteration planning can be a Kanban system. Kanban is the Japanese word for visible card and originates from the Toyota Production System. It is used to minimize inventory, enforce Just-In-Time and eliminate waste.

I have used the Kanban approach to extend the traditional task board with limits on the number of concurrent tasks in different states to reduce work in progress and apply a more pull oriented process. When working with many different specialists in one team, I have also seen high value by extending the board with more states to manage the work of the different specialists. It makes it much more visible and easier to follow the flow and find wastes in the process.

In one team we combined the Kanban approach with a two week release rhythm and that enabled the team to both have a rhythm of planed activities and also do more frequent business requests depending on their capacity and the business prioritization.

The combination of the more traditional iterative processes together with a Kanban approach is very interesting, and I think many teams and organizations will find a lot of value and increased productivity looking into this area.

By Mads Troels Hansen

Maybe you have made some great improvements in your software development organization in 2008 and now it might be easier to reach the expected milestones and get value out to customers/users in a faster way. You might even have introduced some Agile or Lean practices (maybe Scrum) and started to work in a more iterative rhythm with increased collaboration and feedback.

Don’t relax and think it is good enough, because it can be so much better!

When your teams and individuals on a regular basis starts to search for new and improved ways of doing their daily work, you are moving in a direction, where more of the sleeping and hidden potential of the organization gets activated. When people get used to the rhythm of continuous improvements with regular retrospectives, instant kaizen events etc., they will start learning to see some of the candidates for removing wastes and be more efficient. 

Continuous improvements with a structured and constant improved process to find the most important candidates to improve, is key to more business success in your organization and it is essential for you to do it better than your competitors.

It is not only about improving development practices in your development team, because you might just sub-optimize areas with lower impact and poor ROI. Off course you can get a lot of value by having an efficient development infrastructure and teams working with automated testing, emergent design etc., but the bottlenecks might be in the value streams involving people outside development. Working on the right prioritizes with enough knowledge of the business problem, so you can make a simple and optimal solution, often requires an efficient collaboration between business the development team and here might be candidates for larger improvements.

Unfortunately I know of many teams and organizations not doing any kind of regular improvement activities in teams, projects or on a department level. That’s a shame, because they could do it much better and be much more competitive with an improved bottom-line in the company.

So start doing continuous improvements as an individual, in your team or organization, and you will over time learn to see what is really blocking you not to do it better. Just keep in mind that it can take some time and there are a lot of different techniques to get into the root cause of the problems, so you can focus on the constant and sustainable small steps with the largest impact.

By Mads Troels Hansen