It took 6 months for this to come to my attention. Perhaps because the author chose to call the article Finger Charts rather than using the term Cumulative Flow Chart.
I love so much about this story. I love the example diagrams. I love the explanations showing how to read the diagrams and I love the rest of the text explaining how to identify bottlenecks. Akshay correctly identifies the two types of bottleneck: Capacity Constrained; and Non-instant Availability. He has an example of non-instant availability in his BA/QA group.
These are great teaching examples.This first one shows the non-instant availability bottleneck.
While this second one demonstrates how to read the work-in-progress and relates it to cycle time. For me this is at the root of Lean software engineering. Without cumulative flow diagrams, you cannot readily see flow in the work and you cannot achieve a true Lean implementation.
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