It was great, I got to show off our Kanban software production line and get some insightful feedback about our current and future capability. Don pointed out that one of the more advanced things that we’re doing is relaxing the strict FIFO ordering of work items through the workflow. This is necessary for a software production line because of the inherent variability in the size of work requests. There are some things you can do to regulate the size of incoming work requests, but there’s only so much, and nothing like the control you can impose on a manufacturing queue.
Another thing we discussed is the inherent advantage that computing and communication engineers ought to have in managing these things. Queuing, scheduling, and control theory are an essential part of our domain knowledge, so we already possess the right theoretical language for describing workflow processes of any kind. We also agreed on our mutual perplexity at the failure of most practitioners to make this connection.
Kanban discussion
Kanban Group
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