Agile Complexification Inverter

There's a lot of talk these days in the tech sector about "digital _________" or a "______ Platform" - have you noticed it also?  I find this astonishing, as the world turned digital back in the 1980s along with disco.  And as for platform - well adding the word to shoes was a bad idea back then also. So what causes this echo from the past? I don't know - shall we investigate this over the next few months - the dog days of summer 2017? Summer is a season.  Season are cyclical - they come around again and again.  So this brings us to ponder... When do the days get longer and why?  Most people answer Summer.  And what's the longest day of the year (Northern Hemisphere)?  Right June 20th, the summer solstice .  And so the next few days the daylight is getting less and less - all summer long the days get shorter and shorter.  Almost completely backwards from what we thought we knew. Do you remember way back in 2001... when Steve Jobs ...

Concept of Product Development Flow "I believe that the dominant paradigm for managing product development is fundamentally wrong.  Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core.  It is as wrong as we were in manufacturing, before the Japanese unlocked the secret of lean manufacturing.  I believe that a  new paradigm is emerging, one that challenges the current orthodoxy of product development."  -- Donald Reinertsen Reinertsen goes beyond the advance ideas of lean manufacturing, what he calls Flow-Based Product Development. Scrum was sparked by a paper called The New New Product Development Game by  Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka (1986).  Are you seeing a synergy of ideas? Lean principle of Flow In the manufacturing world Toyota exemplifies the achievements one may obtain in 50 years of practicing a new mindset of principles.  Manufacturing deals with repetitive tasks predictable processes to produce component parts, hom...

Big Data for Little Problems -OR- What happens when the customer has better data about the service than the provider and has better networking, better press coverage, better clout, better market reach and reputations? (Feb 23) My good looking wife just spent 2 hours trying to straighten out Frontier's billing machine... it's not easy.  The amazing thing I observed for my recliner while sipping an adult beverage was her influencing techniques.  Now another amazingly disconsernation ( not a word ) is that Frontier has some awesome support people.  But oh-my-god do they have a tough job.  It's the system that has failed.  And they have to figure out how to make some legacy piece-of-crap work. But it's not going to lead to happy satisfied customers (testify). Her father, Jim, moved into the home with us in December, he loves Western movies, and is an encyclopedia of knowledge better than IMDB.  So we called up Frontier (our FiOS provider for 6 years) ...

How would you visualize the value stream of a restaurant? A great teaching example for a team wishing to start Kanban. How do you like to visualize the concurrent activities of beverage service and meal preparations?  I like to see them stacked (not sequential). Hat tip to Derek Wade of Kumdio Adaptive Strategies  for the simulation. This Kanban works very well for the front of the house, but what about the back of the house (the kitchen in restaurant lingo)?  What would the kitchen's kanban board look like? See Also: Why I Use a Paper Kanban Board - Johana Rothman How Personal Kanban Changed My Life -LeadingAgile Which Agile Process Should You Choose? A comparison of Kanban, Scrum, XP, & other processes.