Devops for Growth

Common estimation approaches often fail to give us the predictability we want. Forecasting provides a range of possible outcomes with the chance of outcomes becoming reality. It can answer questions like “When will it be done?” or “What can we deliver by xx?” with confidence.

Here are some tips to help you improve your workflow performance once you have identified the bottlenecks in your system.

Revise your process policies – Reconsider the policies on the step with the longest cycle time and try to identify what needs to change to help reduce the time spent there.
Reduce WIP limits on the states with the longest time – Pay special attention to your queue states and make sure that the number of tasks in your queue states counts towards the WIP limit of its active state. As you decrease the time spent on those columns, you’ll reduce the total cycle time.
Allocate idle team members to work together on the problem area – Delegating responsibility to people with different expertise encourages knowledge sharing and drastically improves collaboration. And that ultimately boosts your employees’ engagement and motivation.
Evaluate your cycle time breakdown over time – By observing the split of the cycle times throughout your process you’ll be able to assess your improvement efforts and keep track of how trends build over time.

Short delivery times are essential for developing a strong competitive advantage. Breaking your cycle times down to small segments and improving them independently, essentially leads to decreasing your overall cycle time.

La théorie des files d’attente est une branche des probabilités modélisant les temps d’arrivée, de traitement, les problèmes de congestion etc dans les files d’attente ou queues.

L’ingénierie réseaux et plus tard la gestion de production industrielle se sont rapidement emparées des principaux résultats de cette discipline pour améliorer leur efficacité. Plus récemment, des activités de services tels que la gestion des guichets de banques ou les urgences hospitalières ont elles aussi bénéficié d’une étude de ce domaine.

Une démarche scientiste consisterait à plaquer aveuglément des équations mathématiques sur l’univers organique et infiniment complexe du SI. Dans notre cas, on étudiera certains résultats de la théorie des files d’attente comme source d’inspiration dans notre démarche d’amélioration continue, en gardant à l’esprit les limites de ces modèles mathématiques.

In Kanban terms, Little’s Law is expressed a little differently, but the idea is the same:

WIP = Throughput * Cycle Time

If we imagine the Kanban board as the store, WIP is equivalent to the number of customers inside at any one time, throughput is the rate of customers passing through the store and cycle time measures how long each one spends inside the system.

This means that if two of the three values are known, the third value can be calculated – without knowing anything else about the tasks, team or project:

WIP = Throughput * Cycle Time

Cycle Time = WIP/Throughput

Throughput = WIP/Cycle Time

Find out what can the Cycle Time metric tell you about your process. Learn how to measure and optimize it for the benefit of an increase in process efficiency.

A look at three popular development methodologies, complete with pitfalls and solutions.