There is a tendency in discussions of staffing and organizational structure to speak of people, especially software engineers, as being fungible—or not. What an exceedingly unpleasant choice of words! People are not fungible. People fungibility is an inappropriate concept. Let’s see how the underpinning issues can be discussed more fruitfully. What is Fungibility? Fungibility is […]
Posts
Managing Context Switching
It has become a commonplace that the throughput of a team’s or individual’s work is significantly slowed by context switching. If, instead of trying to multi-task and performing many different tasks within a given lapse of time, we finish a task before we start another, there will be much less context switching. Consequently, we would […]
Being a coach is like…
Being a coach is like someone helping you learn to ride a bicycle. She can teach you, encourage you and praise you, but she cannot ride the bicycle in your place. Being a coach is like being an acrobat’s safety net. Without taking risks, the acrobat would never learn and without a safety net, the […]
Kanban and field service
Field service work has a variety of constraints and special characteristics that may influence how the flow of field service work is managed using kanban. What is different about field service and what should we take into account when using kanban to manage field service work? Many of the issues that I will describe may […]
Technology and Agility
A recent visit to the ancient site of Epidauros brought to mind some thoughts about how technology can work adversely to agility. The site of Epidauros is perhaps one of the most famous of Hellenic antiquity. Its Askleipion is inscribed in the list of world heritage sites. Fig. 1: The theater at Epidauros While the […]
On outputs and outcomes
I have frequently discussed in passing the difference between the outputs and outcomes of work. Given the importance of the distinction between the two for your service models, it is worthwhile examining the issue in more detail.1 What do I mean by outputs and outcomes? Why is it important to distinguish between them? Some definitions […]
Violin plots for services & kanban
I have frequently remarked that “traditional” analysis of service events and the plotting of data is highly misleading. This is due to a distribution of data that is neither symmetric nor normal. A useful data plotting tool for asymmetric, non normal data distributions is the violin plot. This article joins my series of articles concerning […]
Using spare time
There is a strong contrast between the traditional management view of spare time and the kanban view. Traditional managers1 view spare time as something to avoid, as a sign of inefficiency or even laziness. One important responsibility of such managers is to keep workers busy. In contrast to this, network queuing theory—and kanban in particular—show […]