
SEP Blog
We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.
SEP Named a Winning Company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards
Westfield, IN - January 2022, SEP, a software product design and development firm has been announced as a winning company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards. This recognizes SEP as one of the best tech companies to work for in…
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Builds should fail sometimes
Reposted from my personal blog “Well, you don’t want your builds to succeed all the time…” I remember hearing that for the first time a year or two ago and thinking to myself “that’s probably one of those counter-intuitive truths that make a lot of sense in the context of Agile. This guy is probably some kind […]
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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 […]
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How deep is your Kanban implementation?
Recently a co-worker and I had a brief discussion about whether we were using Kanban, or simply using a “task board” for visualizing our work. Kanban is so much more than only a board with columns, stickie notes, and scribbles all over the place. Kanban is a method, or an approach, to incrementally change/improve your […]
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SEP TeamWorks and Organizational Habits
In SEP TeamWorks and Visual Learning, I wanted to convey the visual nature of** TeamWorks** as a fresh reinvention of Kanban clarity. In this post, I want to focus on TeamWork’s organizational aspects of digital linkage and storage that I like. So with TeamWorks, we have a beautiful pictorial representation of our Kanban board stored […]
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Kanban in daily life
What is Kanban? Read about it at Wikipedia. Basically, it’s a method of visual process management. Often, Post-it Notes are used to signify tasks and they are put on a board with columns to identify each task’s state: ready to do, in process, needs, review, completed, etc. Kanban has made its mark on SEP, showing up in […]
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