Pace Arrivals to Increase Throughput
July 6th, 2005 by Hal
The everyday understanding of lean is do something without waste. Another aspect is to reduce variability. Doing so increases throughput and quality. The fancy way of understanding that is Six Sigma. One of the easier ways to reduce variability is by pacing the flow.
Traffic lights are popping up at on-ramps on the busiest highways to pace cars merging with on-going traffic. Studies have shown that smoothing the arrival of vehicles during rush hours has eliminated collisions and maintained traffic speed at higher levels.
How could pacing arrivals work in the project setting.
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July 6th, 2005 at 8:41 am
Hal,
In agile software development, the iterations act as the traffic lights. Only at an iteration boundary is the Customer permitted to steer the project (ie. request newfeatures, change direction etc). Between times, new features flow undisturbed into the release.
Kevin
July 6th, 2005 at 9:56 am
My field is New Product Development and I believe that ‘pacing’ the flow work in this way can greatly increase the collaborative / iterative working needed on such projects.
How?
Whenever a downstream task or function is ready for work, the preceeding task or function should at least deliver something - whether the information is complete or not. It has long been my belief and experience that a drawing, a specification, or a piece of software does not need to be 100% complete for someone downstream to gain some insight relevent to their work.
This of course means that a common understanding of the maturity of that information is critical in order to avoid wasted effort. When this is in place, traditionally sequential tasks can in fact progress at a relatively even rate in parallel, albeit with a lag for the downstream task.
How you plan and manage this interaction in a Gantt chart though, has left me struggling for years!
Mark
July 6th, 2005 at 11:31 am
Mark,
You don’t manage it in a Gantt chart. The most effective way I’ve found for doing this is by performers promising to complete something (to some level) and then having a daily conversation to report completions. Any qualifications about maturity can be expressed at that time. The approach works extremely well in highly specialized product design and development where one person’s work releases work for others, e.g. design and engineering buildings.
Hal
July 7th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
YES YES —> No Gannt Chart!! (I agree). Collaborative communications (daily conversations work real well) ensure that the missing information/spec./etc is not passed on as “waste” (or reacted upon in a counterproductive way).
July 13th, 2005 at 2:39 am
In UK on our busiest highways (=motorways) we have variable speed limits. as traffic density increeases the speed limit is reduced. This allows more people to travel faster that when there is no speed limit as at lower speeds drivers are willing to drive closer to the vehicle in front (an example of buffer being directly proportional to anxiety). With variable limits the traffic generally keeps moving at the limit. without them traffic often comes to a complete halt. There is a message here for flow on our construction sites and on other projects. it does make sense to “make haste with less speed”