Wednesday, May 30, 2012

                                                                                            By Dominica DeGrandis

Yes - the name has been changed to reflect reality. The “Kanban Weekly Roundup” is the latest of our “Safe to Fail” experiments proving the overly ambitious weekly cadence was in need of adjustment.  Increased teaching and traveling this spring provoked a discussion resulting in a new name for this post - now simply called,  “Kanban Roundup”.  Hoping to post every other week for now.  Stay tuned!

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Wednesday, May 16, 2012

                                                                                            By Dominica DeGrandis

A collection of incredibly impressive thinkers and leaders from around the world has converged in Boston for the Lean Software & Systems Conference. This issue covers some of the many takeaways ….

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Tuesday, May 08, 2012

                                                                                            By Dominica DeGrandis

Next week the Lean Software and Systems conference in Boston will undoubtedly supply a plethora of buzz.  Until then, here’s a series of blog posts from some prolific writers.

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Monday, April 30, 2012

Yesterday’s post was inspired by my recent bike rides around my home neighborhood in Clallam County, Washington. I typically ride the last few miles home on the Discovery Trail - a bike path crafted out of an abandoned railway line that ran from Port Angeles to Sequim and on toward Discovery Bay. About 5 miles from home, the path is cut by a gravel road inside the Carlsborg, WA, industrial park. Recently, the road was resurfaced with rather course gravel, some of the small rocks measuring 1”-2” in size - fine for trucks, not so easy for a racing bike with 25mm tires. When I hit the road spinning at about 20 mph, I had only few seconds before hand to recognize the resurfacing work. I didn’t anticipate how chunky some of it was going to be. As I hit it my bike started to shake violently and bounce left and right.

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My father was a real engineer. He used to get his hands dirty with machinery. He was a machinist (a turner) by trade. He spent much of the latter part of his career commissioning plant and machinery at an explosives factory. Often he or his colleagues would hand craft some of the manufacturing tools with their own machine tools. He spent a lot of time thinking about tolerances. The tolerance in the actual size of a machined part, or a manufactured component, from its specification. These are typical measured in microns, or in his younger days, fractions of an inch. In his broad Glasgow brogue he’d talk of “thous.” Precision was important but like all engineers he was a pragmatist. Perfection wasn’t necessary - near enough was good enough. I worry that recent trends in the Agile community are losing sight of the inherent pragmatism seen in engineers like my father…

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