Stay Lean 2: minimize waste, shorten lead time
A while ago, I put up a praise for staying lean. This week, I stumbled about surprisingly clear guidelines on how to transform to being lean in 12 steps by Stephan Schmidt (Grab the eBook now, it won’t last, I assume).
Among the must-have and priority steps for us, I would take the following:
- Increase quality (which for me is an equivalent of re-defining the criteria of what ‘Done’ means)
- Stop working in parallel
- Continuous deployment
- We have worked on “No single point of failure or bottleneck” lately, yet it still needs a bit of effort
Generally, it is all about minimizing the waste to get the shorter lead times. While pure lean management is not perfect for all of the outsourcing projects, the engineering practices is what needs to be inherited.
We will try to achieve the ultimate goal of continuous deployment on Itteco’s in-house projects. It would really be an awesome accomplishment. So, we’ll try, and you may try with us.
Start minimizing the re-work, which still accounts for most of the waste in our projects. Then go into automation of the deployments to staging servers. Itteco’s project repositories are built to enforce the deployment automation from the day one, and you could check with our Ruby/Rails guys how they are doing it. There is also a good deal of deployment related posts at the Rocket Science blog. Once this is done, we’ll work on the unit/integration tests coverage and minimizing the QA cycle.
Continuous deployment, here we go!