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]

Comments

[Ian Shimmings]

Thanks for the mention on your slide deck (slide 4). The talk looked interesting - I would have liked to attend.

[Dave Kirby]

Hi Clarke. I greatly enjoyed your talk at XPDay04- I had heard of TOC a few times before but knew nothing about it until your presentation. I am now waiting for Amazon to deliver The Goal.

The next day I went to the Systems Thinking Workshop session by Marc Evers and Willem van den Ende. The workshop starts with an exercise that involves throwing balls to each other to simulate a production line. The first time we played it was totally chaotic, then we refactored the process and played again. The interesting thing was that several of us had been to your talk and started applying the principles you had covered. We even stopped the production line when a bottleneck started to build up - something the facilitators had never seen happen before. Willem has photos of the game from previous workshops on his blog at http://ruminations.willemvandenende.com/rublog/rublog.cgi.

All it all, it was a very good conference and I learnt a lot from it.

[Srinivasan S]

Hello Clarke,
Now that your London presentation is over, when are you planning to show us the FRT in the TOCSoftware yahoo group?
Many of us are eagerly waiting for some posting from you.

Regards,
S.Srinivasan