visualizing product flow

2. Reference

3. Challenges in Software Product Development

4. How does Software Development Happen?

5. Using Lean in Software Product Development

6. Lean Guiding Principles
PERFECTION
PULL
PRODUCT FLOW
VALUE STREAM

7. What is Value?
By Womack and Jones

8. Lean Guiding Principles
PERFECTION
PULL
VALUE STREAM
VALUE

9. What is Product Flow??
•Responsiveness to customer “needs” is an important goal for an Organization.
•What it means:
–is to have a continuous and smooth flow that quickly delivers value to the customer.

10. Why is it Difficult?
Product Development has the following
However reality is different
•Most gates start before the previous gate is completed
•Engage in asking for permissions to start the next stage
•Most of the case is “don’t ask don’t tell” policy

11. Blindness
•One of the biggest Blindness in product development is that there is too much of development Design-In-Process Inventory (DIP) happening.
•In Software DIP is invisible as it informational rather than physical.
•High DIP leads to
–Increased risks and long Cycle Times
–Big Queue Sizes
–focus only on cost of capacity
–blindness for Cost of Delay
•Cost of Delay leads in failure to correctly quantify product economics.
•What is Product Economics and how does it drive blindness?

12. Step 1 – Understanding Product Economics
•Economics drives Product Development and its process.
•So many times Organizations change development process to address one of or all of the below
–Eliminate Waste
–Increase Quality
–Raise Efficiency
–Shorten Cycle time
•What is the central premise for Product Economics?
–IS TO MAKE MONEY.

13. Product Economics
Cycle Time
Product Value
Product Cost
Development Time
Risk
•There are five Variables which effect the Product Economics.

14. Effective Product Economics
•Focuses on
–Empowering local decision making
–Does not consider money already spent
–Sequence Handling for maximum benefits
–Always quantify the Cost of Delay
–Understands and optimizes the full value stream

15. Sequence Handling

16. Product Economics
Cycle Time
Product Value
Product Cost
Development Time
Risk
•There are five Variables which effect the Product Economics.

17. Cycle Time
•Has a high economic leverage because
•What causes long product development cycle time?
–Periods of Inactivity rather than slow activity.
•What causes Inactivity?
–Product Development Queues.
•Effect of Inactivity
–High DIP Inventory

18. Step 2 – Understanding Queues
•Queues profoundly affects Product Economics by causing Valuable work products to sit idle.
•Thus work products keep adding up in Queues and there by increase the DIP Inventory which is invisible.
•Many Organizations do not know how to identify and manage their Product development queues.

19. Impact of Queue
Queues Create
Longer Cycle Time
Increased Risk
More Variability
Lower Quality
Less Motivation
Increases the Cost of delay
Increases the transit time through product development pipeline
Small deviations amplify cycle time to handle variability
Delayed feedback leads to higher costs
Longer Queues rob the sense of Urgency they by inducing little value to finish fast
Queues are hidden source of development waste

20. How to identify Queues?

21. Managing Queues
•Use Cumulative Flow Diagrams (CFD) to monitor them
•Wait time = Avg Backlog Size / Velocity
•Control Queue size
•Don’t control capacity utilization
–While it has the beneficial effect of improving efficiency, it also has the negative effect of increasing cycle time
•Know when to intervene
•Avoid high-queue states

22. Simple CFD for Queue
Time in Queue
Quantity in Queue
Cumulative Quantity
Time

23. Step 3 – Factors affecting Flow
•Batch size
–One of the most important thing to impact flow is Batch size of the Design-In-Process Inventory (DIP)
–Smaller batch size reduces risks and accelerate feedbacks
•Variable flow
–Happens due to congestion because of
•Aging items in Queues
–Irregular Cadence because of
•Processes used for cadence

24. Step 4 – Visualizing Flow
•Use Value Stream Map to help Visualize Flow.

25. Lean Guiding Principles
PERFECTION
PULL
VALUE
PRODUCT FLOW

26. Value stream
•Is
–a lean-management method
–for analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the series of events that take a product or service from its beginning through to the customer.
•Can
–help organizations identify and end wasteful activities
–help drive needed change

27. Value Stream in Product Development
by Slack

28. Purpose of Value Stream Mapping and Analysis
•Develop a common understanding of the current process
–The relationship of process steps
–A true picture of the process
•Create a baseline to measure improvements against
•Define a vision of the future process
•Establish common leadership objectives
•Identify opportunities for improvement
•Design an implementation plan for improvements
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process,
you don’t know what you’re doing.” W. Edwards Deming

29. Value Stream Process Steps
1. Prepare
2. Gather Data & Develop Current State
3. Develop Future State & Action Plan
4. Execute to Plan
5. Align

30. Value Stream in Software Product Development
Product Development - Project A
Product Development - Project B
Product Value Stream
•Knowledge value stream
•Emphasizes on creating, capturing and reusing knowledge during different product development project
•captures knowledge from all previous projects is used as a foundation for having a faster and higher quality product development
•Product value stream
by Kennedy, Harmon and Minnoch

31. Lean Guiding Principles
PERFECTION
VALUE
PRODUCT FLOW
VALUE STREAM

32. Pull
•This principle applies in the whole value stream.
•It means that upstream should not produce a good or service until the immediate customer downstream request it.
•This principle creates the ability to design, schedule and produce exactly what and when the customer wants while inventories are reduced.
•Kanban and Just-In-Time are two related tools used to control resupply and to optimize inventories.

33. Lean Guiding Principles
PULL
VALUE STREAM
VALUE
PRODUCT FLOW

34. Perfection
•Plays an important role in getting value
•Achieve it by continuously removing wastes.
•The faster flow exposes hidden waste in the value stream, the harder you pull, and the more the disruptions and bottlenecks in the flow can be revealed and removed

35. Lean Guiding Principles
PULL
VALUE STREAM
VALUE
PRODUCT FLOW
PERFECTION