1.2: Need for Incremental and Iterative Delivery - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->In parallel to project management, the concept</v> called lean manufacturing was becoming increasingly popular. Lean manufacturing is based on rigorous process thinking and it originated in manufacturing. And actually it has its roots in the construction of the arsenal in Venice, Italy in 1450s The first highly efficient production was implemented for ship building, where 1600 people divided the production into three main stages, framing, planking, and cabins and then final assembly. The arsenal use standardized interchangeable parts. It streamlined the assembly part and enabled minimal handling of materials, during each stage of production. In the early 20th century Henry Ford implemented a very similar streamlined and highly efficient process in car building. What he did was that he modernized the car assembly line and grouped assembly activities by steps while making an inventory of parts available by each process groups. This process was focused on increasing efficiency and minimizing what was called waste. This process was later picked up by Toyota manufacturing. It allowed by efficient mass production of high quality cars. After the second World War, the Toyota production system was brought to the attention of the global community by the American writer and management consultant, Peter Drucker. According to Peter Drucker, it included five important concepts. The most important one was Defining Value. Value was defined by the customer as a need for a specific product. All activities that do not add value were defined as waste and definitely should be avoided. The second one was Value Stream Mapping. A value stream is a set of processes involved in taking product from raw material to customer delivery, basically value production. The process of identifying the value stream is referred to as value stream mapping and its important step in approaching delivery and optimization. The third one was Optimizing Flow. The flow is defined as the sequence of processes and their efficiency in order to ensure that work is being done to deliver the product or service. As a result, the goal is to improve time to market and increase efficiency. This is a simple but very hard to implement concept. In his book, The Flow about the transformation of a production plant, Alero Goldthread told us a story of a plant manager who is using the flow based theory of constraints to improve performance and save the plant on 90 days. The theory of constraints is a methodology that takes a specific approach to improvement. It is based on identifying the most important limiting factor which is called a constraint. It is referred to as a bottleneck in manufacturing. Something that stays in a way of achieving a goal and then systematically improves the constraint the weakest link in the chain until it is no longer the limiting factor. So think about pouring water from a very large glass to a narrow one. If the flow is too fast then the whole process will slow down. So the idea of the theory of constraints is to address only the bottleneck. If you address any other part of the process you will make it only slower. The fourth concept is Establishing Pull. There are multiple manifestations of waste in the delivery life cycle. And overproduction is a major route of inefficiency. Work is pulled step by step based on capacity rather than push to the next step in the value chain. So think about it. If you are really busy and then the work upstream is piling up. Now you have to select which out of the activities to take. And then over production happens. Think about a warehouse. There are so many different items there that it's impossible to find the one that you need. Instead, to the other manufacturing implemented just in time manufacturing process to create inventory just for those items that are needed. Plus just a few more. that is called Pull Technique versus Push. Then the completed work is push towards the producer in the next step. And the fifth principle is Pursue Perfection. Despite all the significant gains that lean thinking is bringing to manufacturing. It's important to understand lean is not a static system. Continuous reflection and retrospective are the foundation of lean thinking. There is a well known quote from one of the Toyota top managers who was asked, why do they let anyone to tour their production facilities? Even their competitors could come and tour the facility and steal their secrets. And the top manager responded that the competitors would copy their today's practices and tomorrow Toyota would already be doing things differently. So those concepts of personal accountability, respect for people, lightweight leadership, continuous improvement and delivery of value made Lean more than a project management method. It became a mindset. Despite apparent simplicity, lean thinking was a revolutionary method of delivering products. In the book, Smarter, Faster, Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity. The New York Times best selling author, Charles Duhigg described the transformation. This transformation brought a very old, a poorly producing GM production plant in Fremont, California to a most successful production plant in the United States. In 1982 plant had the reputation of the worst auto production factory in the world. The employees were absent from work due primarily to drinking issues. And the quality was so low that one of every two finished cars had major problems. Two years later, the plant was reopened. It adopted lean manufacturing framework from the Toyota production system or TPS. They also described multiple mindset changes that were adopted. Decisions were pushed to the lower level. Workers took ownership over identifying and addressing mistakes. Once they saw a problem there was something called Andon cord or signaling pull cord installed along the production lines. Every worker could stop the conveyor by pulling this cord the moment they saw a defective product. it was a real important decision because if they stopped the conveyor belt it would cause the factory $15,000 a minute. But it trusted that that employees were able to make the right decision to address quality issues and avoid waste. And they did take ownership. So as a result of TPS adoption by 1986 productivity had doubled and absenteeism was down from 25% to 3%. Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Agile practitioners took lean concepts into the area of software development. They came up with four major principles. The first one is, Built the right thing. That was the first time where product management was seen as the center of project delivery. Understand and deliver real value to customers. The second principle, Build it fast: dramatically reduce lead time from customer need to deliver it solution. The third one is, Building the thing right. Guaranteed quality and speed. In software it means automated testing, integration and continuous deployment. And the first, the fourth one is Learn through feedback. Evolve the product design based on early and frequent end-to-end feedback. Those four principles still are at the basis of lean software development.