These guys are awesome - Bret Dodd and Sterling Mortensen. Last year they attended Lean Design and Development and watched my presentation. They were so impressed and felt it was such a good fit for their process for development of printer firmware that they went back to HP and plotted the historical cumulative flow diagram. Here it is...

Look at the growing WIP. The thin blue line at the bottom is the "complete" stuff

This is what happened next (right after Lean D&D last March)...

WIP is under control and flow is smooth

What these charts don't show is the real improvement. I wish I could share the whole slide deck. I'll find out if it is going to be posted on the Web. So here are the numbers. A 10x reduction in inventory in the system. A 5x reduction in WIP. A 3.4x increase in productivity with no new money, resources, people or any change in the way software engineering (development and test) were conducted. These figures are even better than my Microsoft XIT Sustained Engineering project results. Now here is the real kicker - a reduction in lead (cycle) time from 9 months to only 2 months. Printer firmware development at HP was never this good. Imagine what this means for the people. They now go home early on Friday afternoons, they don't work overtime, they have rediscovered their social lives, their families and their passions.

What this case study really proves is (1) these techniques really work, (2) David Anderson doesn't need to be in the room or involved as a coach for them to work, (3) it's all in the book, reading it, internalizing it and living it is all that is needed.

Actually, the whole story is fascinating. The guys went through the same learning curve I did since 1997 (for them it was 2002 until now) that first you need to abandon task centric planning and embrace a feature-driven approach. This enables you to start thinking and using Lean and Theory of Constraints thinking. There total productivity gain was over 8x but the first 2.8x improvement came prior to them reading and implementing my material on cumulative flow and managing with queues.

I sat in the room watching this unfold yesterday afternoon, humbled and proud at the same time. It makes me realize why I come in to work in the morning and why Microsoft called me and offered me a job. Thanks guys! You made my day, my week and my year. It's good to be alive and working on software engineering process improvement. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson