Process

Only by increasing flow through the constraint can overall throughput be increased – Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal, 1984

Turning this around we get the corollory that optimizations made to areas other than the constraint only serve to worsen the constraint.

Agile practices, and particularly Scrum and SAFe, have been widely adopted in large enterprises over the last decade or so, spawning entirely new departments dedicated to locking down the process. Agile Centers of Excellence (CoEs) produce materials explicitly describing every aspect of their company’s specific flavour of Agile, and have coaches dedicated to enforcing it across the teams.

What is it like to work at your company? Think about it carefully. How do your people spend their time? What culture and behaviours do you incentivize? Is it a good place to work?

Culture in this context describes how people interact at work, the processes and policies, productivity friction, meeting efficiency, et cetera. Your company’s culture describes what it is like to work for your company, and it has an outsized impact on the type of people your company is able to attract and retain, and whether they feel productive at work.

A trucker delivering palletized cargo to a pier would have to remove each item from the pallet and place it on the dock. Longshoreman would then replace the items on the pallet for lowering into the hold, where other longshoreman would break down the pallet once more and stow each individual item - all at a cost so high that shippers knew not to send pallets to begin with. – The Box, Marc Levinson. P143

[Read More]