From the category archives:

drum-buffer-rope

Not Accountable, Not Responsible

by Pete Abilla August 9, 2008

Team size can make a big difference in the success of your service or product. What is counterintuitive for most people is that the larger the team size, the lower the likelihood of success for your service or product.  Why? Entropy can set in and large teams are inherently bad vehicles for communication. More insipid, [...]

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Maintain Forward Tension

by Pete Abilla July 20, 2008

One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension.  To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management. Tension is a type of Energy A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows: soft and relaxed strength will put your [...]

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Fast Food Congestion

by Pete Abilla July 9, 2008

Every system has constraints — sometimes several — minor bottlenecks and major bottlenecks.  What makes managing constraints even more challenging is that bottlenecks move: up-and-down the process paths. I saw this phenomenon recently during a visit to a fast food restaurant, which I discuss in this post — but, my application of the Theory of [...]

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Attitude and the Pyschology of Queueing

by Pete Abilla February 2, 2008
This entry is part 20 of 28 in the series queueing theory

I took the kids to see a movie at a nearby dollar theater many weeks ago.  We saw Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and some parts of that movie has stayed with me.  I thought that the movie was actually very good: it was an overall very good feel-good movie, with a very good message.  One [...]

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Takt Time and Dumber-by-the-Minute

by Pete Abilla January 17, 2008

I remember a very humbling experience of thinking that I knew how to solve problems and being shown just the opposite by an hourly associate.  That was during my internship while I was in graduate school; I was haughty, boasting that I came from a top university and demonstrating in my thoughts and body language [...]

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The Hidden Factory: Would the Customer Pay for That?

by Pete Abilla January 14, 2008

The Hidden Factory is a term that refers to activities in an operation or standard operating procedure (SOP).  A few examples of Hidden Factories are workarounds, rework, or any of the 7 wastes, which I will describe below.  Most organizations have some form of a Hidden Factory and being able to "see" these hidden factories [...]

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Featuritis and the Customer Experience

by Pete Abilla November 18, 2007

The more I learn and practice ethnography and design-thinking, the more I notice subtle but incredibly frustrating experiences.  For example, I had a frustrating experience with a faucet that was in the hospital room where our adopted baby girl, Mylie, was born.  This faucet is an automated one — with a sensor.  So, whenever an [...]

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Bottlenecks and Fast Food

by Pete Abilla November 17, 2007

One of the key lessons in The Theory of Constraints is that the contraint or the bottleneck determines the throughput for the entire system.  This means, then, that if we optimize and improve a non-bottleneck, then those efforts have almost zero impact on the overall throughput of the system.  It is only when we improve [...]

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Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything!

by Pete Abilla November 11, 2007

In August 2006, Mary Poppendieck was nice enough to entertain questions from my readers on the topic of Lean for Software.  Some great questions were submitted and Mary answered them.  Well, she’s willing to do that again, so please submit your questions for Mary and she will answer some of those questions.  I will then [...]

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