Lean Articles

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 Best Places to Work Company for 14th Consecutive Year

SEP has once again been recognized as one of Indiana’s Best Places to Work for the 14th year consecutive year. The statewide survey and award program evaluates participating organizations and honors those with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and…

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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, […]

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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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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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SEP TeamWorks and Visual Learning

SEP TeamWorks is a tool that lets you view, edit, and create work items for Team Foundation Server 2008, 2010, and 2012. Let me tell you why I like it in my Agile toolkit. First, the flow of TeamWorks. Post-its embody the dexterous feel of the lean/agile work environment: they’re bite-sized quanta, easily movable, that […]

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