The metaphor Erik and I use for this these days, is that you have an engine which starts running very efficiently and is very powerful, but the car around it hasn’t changed, so the transmission can’t cope…

Then you can decide to optimize the car as well, but you discover there are holes in the road. Then you can start to fix the holes in the road and so on…

The xp-team is the engine, the organisation around it the car, the organisation around the organisation the road etc.

At XP-Day London, Mary Poppendiecks lecture on Lean Development reminded me of some of the interesting things in Lean Manufacturing and the theory of constraints.

Value Stream Mapping

At least there are tools to identify why your xp-team has diffculty interoperating with other teams within the organisation, and maybe with your customer as well, especially Value Stream Mapping seems interesting. This is where an organisation or team identifies which activities, at what point in time produce value, and other times when there is just waiting for e.g. supplies from outside. An example of elements in a value stream are a finished piece of software waiting for acceptance (not providing, value, just waiting) or customer and programmers discussing requirements (providing value, because the vision for the system is growing). The idea is to look end-to-end end shorten the time it takes a requirement to be turned into deployed software, so that an organisation can respond faster to changing demands.

Kaizen Events

There are also things from Lean Manufacturing with which you can get a whole organisation (the car) to work on their process collaboratively. Kaizen Events look particularly interesting. This is where you take a day with a group, identify things that can improve, and actions to take to do the improvement. I guess the Retrospectives we run are similar, but Kaizen events seem to work with very large groups as well.