The company of like-minded people

I've just returned home from my first conference ever: London's XPDay 2004! 

It was brilliant.  I got to put faces to several virtual friends.  And I got to chat to one of my heros Tom Gilb. 

I do so much like the company of like-minded people!

I ran a workshop introducing Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.  It seemed to be well received and I was told that some attendees even used the "5 focusing steps" during a practical exercises in a later session!  Cool!

So, here's the powerpoint presentation.

There were 4 parts to the presentation:

1. The introduction, overview and chain analogy.  My favourite introduction to TOC is this free chapter from Goldratt's Critical Chain book.
2. Managing bottlenecks using the "5 focusing steps".  This section included a borrowed animation and my assertions that
   (a) software development is THE bottleneck to new product development - i.e. the organisations future - in many organisaitons,
   (b) identifying the physical bottleneck within a software development system is not as easy as in a manufacturing system, but it is possible,
   (c) it's much easier to identify the physical bottleneck in agile/iterative/incremental environments than in waterfall environments, and,
   (d) within most software development systems the constraint is not a bottleneck, but 3 policy constraints - the waterfall sdlc + critical path project management + doing too many projects at once.
3. The evils of multitasking.  I think my simple animation in powerpoint says a lot but TOC guru Tony Rizzo's says it better.  [By the way, the example in my animation is fairly simple but I borrowed it from an article written by an TOC guru Richard Zultner].
4. The current reality tree explained how the waterfall SDLC tries to prevent rework, but ends up causing so much rework that the Critical Path method (which seems to assume no variation) explodes.  The CRT is a fantastic tool for bringing clarity to messy, tangled situaitons and for finding the few "root causes".

If you attended and would like to know more then first follow the links above, then read Goldratt's Critical Chain book, then email me and I'll make a few other suggestions.

[BTW: if you attended my session then (thanks and) I'd love to hear what you thought.  I'd especially like to hear any any suggestions for improving the content and or my presentation style.  Please, please, please email me at clarke.ching at gmail.com]