Software Engineering Management at Scale with the Theory of Constraints
This talk will describe how we can enable the businesses to manage software engineering efforts at scale in a financially sound way, all the while dealing with multiple projects/products or value streams, multiple events or deadlines, multiple stakeholders and multiple teams.
It will show how to resolve the conundrum of dependency management at scale by collapsing the combinatorial explosion of dependency networks into a simple linear queue.
It will describe how to instrument the organization in order to raise leading signals of oncoming trouble in order to trigger intense, frequent and engaging collaboration between all players (business and engineering), leading to an environment that unleashes the organization's collective intelligence via co-creation and social learning.
The talk will highlight techniques employed to foster intense collaboration between engineering and business, at scale.
It has been employed, among others, in a case in the automotive industry involving an organization with 8.000 people, half of which in 120 engineering teams distributed globally across the world, dealing with on average 400 projects in process at any time, and 70,000 change requests per month. The focused approached allowed the organization to improve it's operational throughput by 40% in a matter of months after inception.
The approach is data driven, and takes into account: Flow metrics, Buffer Burn Rate, Virtual Queue Sizes, Operational Throughput, Financial Throughput, Financial Throughput Rate.
The techniques used are a re-elaboration of the Theory of Constraints, taking elements of Drum-Buffer-Rope scheduling and Critical-Chain Project Management, and combining them with queuing theory and Little's Law.
The metrics and signals produced are also used to trigger collective psychological flow states leading to sustainable and optimal human experience at work.
Outline/Structure of the Talk
The talk will present the following topics
- Backgrounder: who is Steve Tendon (3 min)
- Introduction to the Theory of Constraints (3 min)
- Economic view of Backlogs (5 min)
- Balance, separation of concern, and collaboration between business and engineering (5 min)
- Finding the Constraint in the Work Process (2 min)
- Little's Law and system stability (2 min)
- Execution Management via CCPM-Style Buffers (3 min)
- Finding the Constraint in the Work Flow (7 min)
- Finding the Constraint in the Work Execution (5 min)
- Achieving Scalelessness (1 min)
- Integration with classical Project Management (1 min)
- Dependency Management (2 min)
- Psychological Flow States (2 min)
- Fostering agile interaction and collaboration (2 min)
- How to get started with the approach: agile bootstrapping expediencies (2 min)
- Conclusions (2 min)
Learning Outcome
The participants will learn how to manage a scaled software engineering environment with multiple projects/products or value streams, multiple events or deadlines, multiple stakeholders and multiple teams.
They will gain new tools to manage the backlogs in a financially sound way.
They will be able to confront and master the most complex dependencies, with development or delivery precursors; architectural elements and architectural dependencies; exploratory works; failure demand work.
They will know how to quickly bootstrap the fundamentals of this approach with simple actions at the team level.
Target Audience
Executives, VP, Directors, Mid-senior management in software engineering organizations; Software engineering managers; PMOs and Project Managers; Product Owners and Scrum Masters; Software Engineers and DevOps Engineers; Agile Coaches/Consultants
Prerequisites for Attendees
This is very advanced talk. The more you know about Lean, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe and other contemporary methods, frameworks the better. The talk refers a lot to the Theory of Constraints. TOC concepts will be introduced very briefly, but if you already know about them, the better. In particular, previous knowledge of Critical-Chain Project Management, Drum-Buffer-Rope Scheduling, Fever Charts, Throughput Accounting will be very helpful. If you have read the Phoenix Project book, you will have a good basis from which to start.
Video
Links
The presentation is an extract of my book Standing on Bits, Agile Software Engineering Management at Scale with the Theory of Constraints, available on LeanPub: https://leanpub.com/standingonbits.
This material has never been presented in public conferences before.
schedule Submitted 11 months ago
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