lean Articles
Agile and The Indianapolis 500
The Indianapolis 500 has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. And after years of building software at SEP — an Indiana company through and through — the similarities are striking. The pre-race strategy sessions. Testing assumptions during practice sessions. Real-time adjustments during pit stops. The moment when weather […]
This one’s for you, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi fans
If you’ve read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, or even if you’ve just seen a diagram like this one and it inspired you to figure out which activities put you in flow… boy, do I have a blog post for you ???? I have to admit I never read the book, […]
Did the 1973 Oil Crisis Create Lean Software Development?
US car companies were booming in the early 1970’s. Americans loved big cars and had cash to buy them. Demand for oil rose so quickly that, by 1969, the US began importing oil. Not long after, oil exporting nations began using US dependence on their oil to influence US foreign policy. During the first embargo […]
Pulling the Andon Cord
In the manufacturing world, the Andon cord obligates anybody who spots a problem to stop production. Anybody. Andon cords are a part of the Toyota Production System. The Andon cord is a simple rope that extends the length of the production line. (Black/yellow cords in the picture above) Pulling the rope stops production. Toyota not […]
Bringing #NoEstimates into an FDA world
The last few years I have been part of a team that is building diabetes management apps for both iOS and Android. Our client partner is a global leader in the diabetes care market. We want our partner to be successful…necessarily we have to understand the constraints that they are working with in order to […]
What is DevOps?
What is DevOps? The word DevOps is a clipped version of the words Development and Operations [1]. What does development mean? Development is the process of designing, building and testing software. This includes product design user experience, software architecture, software design and coding. What does operations mean? The term operations describes the process of building […]
Running Lean Startup Experiments Internally
When building a business or software, it is easy to make assumptions about what the market will want or how users will interact with your product. Recently, the concept of the Lean Startup Experiment has emerged to help us explicitly acknowledge these assumptions and construct small experiments to validate our assumptions. Here at SEP, we […]
Where have you been all my life?
Someone asked me a few weeks ago how lean/agile (little L, little A) has changed how I worked. At the time, I didn’t think that I’ve changed what I did all that much. Sure, lean and agile practices have refined how things are done. Kanban, story mapping, and product ownership are just some of the […]
Make it Real. Make it Simple.
Make it Real. Make it Simple. There is a lesson that keeps becoming apparent the more I practice Agile or Lean methods. Simple is best. To illustrate the point, I want to talk about some tools that are powerful because they are simple. Paper Prototype One of the easiest ways to gain shared understanging of […]
Lean/Agile Pay It Forward
We have a Pay It Forward Program here at SEP, where we get $50 from the company to do something nice in this season of giving. It can’t go to friends or family; it can’t be just another charitable donation to a .org. Many Pay It Forward participants have bought cups of coffee for strangers, […]
5 Ways All Software Projects are Product Replacements
I was updating my bio at work for the last few projects I’ve been on since I was between projects. I looked back at some of the projects I’ve worked on and remembered the “good ol’ times”. Some projects were executed well and the client appreciated the outcome (read: warm fuzzies), while others produced a […]
Getting the Most Value with a Development Partner
What is software development? When we say software we typically mean a software product to sell to a market or a system to increase productivity. In both cases, doesn’t the customer have some idea of the cost and potential value before the project is initiated? If the initial estimated cost versus the expected value (Rate […]