how to use continuous improvement kungfu to pay down technical debt - kevin behr & jesse palmer
TRANSCRIPT
Date
how to use continuous improvement kung-fu to pay down technical debt
Kevin Behr Chief Science Officer Assemblagepointe Inc. Jesse Palmer OSS Manager Hedgeserv
Monday, September 30, 13
We looked at what was in our way
✤ hyper kinetic team
✤ lacked a structured system of work
✤ drive by management
✤ we sit between dev and ops
✤
Monday, September 30, 13
so we started experimenting
✤ needed a rock paper scissor system of work
✤ to contain all commitments and requests
✤ wanted to see backlog and flow of work
✤ yeah we used a kanban (leankit that is)
✤ we started a light weight continuous improvement kata
Monday, September 30, 13
our improvement kata
✤ based on improvement kata used at toyota
✤ each morning we have a standup for 15 minutes
✤ go over answers to yesterdays 5Q
Monday, September 30, 13
Target Condition
✤current condition
Monday, September 30, 13
five questions
✤ what is the target condition?
✤ what is the current condition?
✤ what are a few obstacles to achieving the target condition?
✤ which obstacle will you experiment on today?
✤ What is your experiment?
✤ (when can we go and see the results of your expreiment?)
Monday, September 30, 13
what happened
✤ our first target condition was to get all of the work in the kanban and make it visible.
✤ we did and we started noticing stuff like distractions and interuptions (aka Newmans)
✤ we had no idea what we were doing so built simple project plans
✤ we had lots of issues started doing RCA on breaks
✤ built a feedback loop to dev to fix issues
✤ we built a list of techical debt projects we wanted to get done
Monday, September 30, 13
paying off murphy
✤ we set a new target condition of putting at least half of our effort toward paying down tech debt as a team and still meeting priorities.
✤ we failed over and over
✤ obstacles
✤ better project plans - not overly planned just needed to est cadence and prevent driveby’s
✤ we needed dev to fix some things
✤ we needed a mission to help us stay on track
Monday, September 30, 13
slog
✤ every day one standup -one obstacle - one experiment - one 5q
✤ like climbing one stair a day
✤ we hit our target condition once
✤ we hit it twice
Monday, September 30, 13
we now believed we could
✤ we realized what we really wanted (our Stake)
✤ we realized unplanned work was getting inour way
✤ the kanban painted an actual picture
✤ we decided to use the kanban to investigate.
✤ lots of experiments
✤ lots of failure
✤ we recruited help from dev and brough another team in
Monday, September 30, 13
it is growing
✤ we are adding another small team to start expreimenting
✤ they are downstream from the constraint (us)
✤ we will add another team to our merry band
✤ now dev and engineering can see our backlogs
✤ we can coordinate ready and doing for faster flow
✤ we are running the larger system at the speed of the constraint (us)
Monday, September 30, 13
throughput is up
✤ we are now all moving toward continuous delivery
✤ it will be our new target condition
✤ we will remove or dis-solve all of the obstacles
✤ we have a simple method to navigate uncertainty (the scientific method)
Monday, September 30, 13
current condition
✤ our teams are building faster feedback loops
✤ we are planning missions together
✤ we can run “plays”
✤ we can absorb unexpected events without losing our memory aand crashing commitments
✤ people wait on us less (lower cycle time)
Monday, September 30, 13
Monday, September 30, 13
✤ Kevin Behr @kevinbehr
✤ Jess Palmer @crocketttubbs
Monday, September 30, 13