From the category archives:

featuritis

Living with the Suboptimal

by Pete Abilla February 18, 2007

Launching a new website, front-end store, or product requires several trade-off’s.  Here are two principles I learned at Amazon that still ring true to me. Living with the Suboptimal The result of external competitive pressures and a resource-constrained development environment is that we almost always have to live with the suboptimal: we have to launch [...]

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Process Cycle Efficiency (PCE)

by Pete Abilla February 13, 2007

What is a Process? A process is an systematic activity comprising of smaller activities that culminate in an outcome — service or product. A process can take up time, space, and resources. All processes can be categorized into the following categories: Value-added, Non-value added but necessary, and Non-value added. From the Customer’s Perspective: Value-added: This [...]

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The Apple iPhone Supply Chain

by Pete Abilla January 18, 2007

I am teaching a class in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. As part of that class, we discuss global supply chain strategy as well as other things pertaining to Operations.  I thought it might be fun to map the supply chain of the new Apple [...]

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Simplify Your Product Design

by Pete Abilla January 6, 2007

My earlier post titled, Good Complexity, Bad Complexity, I discuss a few case studies where produce and process complexity can be good, and where it can be bad. One of the areas in which a balance needs to be had between a rich feature set and low maintentance and manfucting overhead is in how we [...]

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12 Questions with Mary Poppendieck

by Pete Abilla August 28, 2006

Last week, I invited the readers of shmula to pose questions to Mary Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback), which won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004 and, the sequel Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback) which will be available in early [...]

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Focus on the Customer

by Pete Abilla July 24, 2006

Jeff Bezos, during a pre-peak meeting once said to a small group of us that there will be many, many winners on the internet. He said that some follow the close-follower mentality and those companies focus on the competition. He continued to say that Amazon has and always will be customer obsessed. He vowed that [...]

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