In my previous post I described TOC's 5 focusing steps. In TOC these are called POOGI which stands for "Process Of On Going Improvement".
Tim Sullivan has written a nice explaination of POOGI in a manufacturing environment. Even better, take a look at this animation, which applies to software development.
BTW: Alistair Cockburn has a section on using POOGI in Agile Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck mention it in Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers, my dissertation had an example where lack of one department - our actuaries - crippled the analysis phase of the project, making it take much longer, and causing lots of expensive rework.
