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 Wins TechPoint’s 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…

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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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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 […]

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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 […]

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