During my tenure as a Software Delivery Director at MHR is when I have realised that lean manufacturing cannot be applied literally to software development. This is when I have started focusing on lead and cycle time together with the software development team to drive change. During this period we…

In the previous article I have stated that Lean manufacturing methods cannot be applied literally to software engineering. If methods cannot be applied literally then let’s explore how they can be applied laterally. Goals are still the same Your business goals are still the same as in the manufacturing. Your business cares about delivering quality…

Knowledge work organisations are plagued by handovers. Handovers are normally required for two reasons: People doing the work don’t have the skill to perform the whole task, so it needs to be handed over to the next specialist. There is separation of duties due to security or hierarchy. Handovers are…

I have been fascinated by one-piece flow and small batches for a long time, this is of-course due to my weird obsession with Lean Manufacturing. One afternoon when it was almost home time I asked a few of my colleagues to participate in a game that would “prove” that one-piece…

Agile methodologies borrow ideas from lean manufacturing. While some ideas such as standards, components, trunk-based development, and value streams have been very useful, others such as Kanban, Theory of Constraints (ToC), Little’s Law and one-piece flow get applied incorrectly. As a practitioner I have immersed myself in these concepts by…

Background Recently I have faced an interesting question. How do you train and deploy ML models in a multi-tenant environment (same software used by many different companies) where the same model needs to be different per company? Lets say your operational research company has written some optimisation software. Your software allows…