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.
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