Topic 1.2 - Methodologies

Agile 

When starting a new project, the traditional way was: gather a team, book a conference room, and plan the whole project upfront. If something changes, you’re in trouble and in software development, that “something” changes all the time.

This called for a new project management philosophy, one that embraces the shifting nature of project requirements and so Agile was born. Instead of coming up with a BIG plan and hoping nothing unexpected happens, Agile allows you to change a project’s direction on the go.

The Agile approach consists of many overlapping methodologies and Kanban is one of them.

JIT 

Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, also known as just-in-time production or the Toyota Production System (TPS), is a methodology aimed primarily at reducing flow times within production as well as response times from suppliers and to customers.

Following its origin and development in Japan, largely in the 1960’s and 1970’s and particularly at Toyota.

Kaizen 

Kaizen, Japanese for “improvement”.

When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, Kaizen refers to activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers.

It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. It has been applied in healthcare, psychotherapy, life coaching, government, banking and other industries.

Lean Thinking

Lean thinking is a business methodology that aims to provide a new way to think about how to organize human activities to deliver more benefits to society and value to individuals while eliminating waste.

The term lean thinking was coined by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones to capture the essence of their in depth study of Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System.

Lean thinking is a new way of thinking any activity and seeing the waste inadvertently generated by the way the process is organized by focusing on the concepts of:

Scrum 

Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products. Consists of Scrum’s roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together. Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland developed Scrum.

Waterfall vs Agile

Kanban (Development)

Kanban is a method for managing knowledge work which balances the demand for work to be done with the available capacity to start new work.

Intangible work items are visualized to present all participants with a view of the progress of individual items, and the process from task definition to customer delivery.

Team members ‘‘pull’’ work as they have capacity, rather than work being «pushed» into the process when requested.

Kanban in the context of software development provides a visual process management system that aids decision making concerning what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

Although the method originated in software development and IT projects, the method is more general in that it can be applied to any professional service, where the outcome of the work is intangible rather than physical.

The method was inspired by the Toyota’s Production System and by Lean Manufacturing

Bad Reasons to Choose Kanban