Agile Development Blog

Jean in the mini-kitchen at Rally headquarters.

Jean has been doing a series of posts (What is with all the Agile process overhead? – part 1,  What is with all the Agile process overhead? – part 2, and How do you plan for unplanned work? – part 3.) on what goes in your backlog.  We have both noticed that it is really tempting to put the kitchen sink in your backlog.  At Rally, we only do progressive elaboration of stories based on subsequent levels of planning, which ends up looking a bit like this:

• Ideas and research topics managed by product line on the wall and adjusted across product lines every quarter
• Epics at the roadmap level (multiple release level) managed in a roll-up project in Rally’s Agile project management solution and estimated every eight weeks for release planning
• Stories at the release level managed in individual projects in Rally elaborated every eight weeks at release planning
• Tasks at iteration level managed by team member in Rally and elaborated every two weeks at iteration planning

As a result, we keep our backlog well groomed and do not waste time (muda) managing excess inventory or over-investing in stories that are not guaranteed to get built.  I have noticed it is really tempting to try and load all your ideas, suggestions and half-baked stories into a product like Rally.  We built Rally to make that uncomfortable – to try and discourage that.  Rally focuses you and the team on the iteration and not a big list of defects and bugs, while our coaches and technical account managers try to help folks move away from thinking of our system as an inventory manager.  We think of Rally and design it as a real-time decision support system.  (See my 2006 article in SD Times on “Kill your inventory manager” for more on this topic.)

As Jean and I were talking about this in our kitchen, I was noticing something  (see the picture). In this picture, there are no dirty dishes in the sink.  This is a relatively new occurrence here at Rally.  It happened when we moved from our old location, which had a huge kitchen and two dishwashers, to this new building. We doubled our square feet but shrunk our kitchen space in half with no dishwashers as a result of an in-house cafeteria that we share with Oracle and Quantum.

With almost no counter space and no dishwasher to batch up dirty dishes, you have to clean your dishes as you use them.  For the 150+ people who work at this office, that means a real just-in-time process of dirty it and then clean it.  As a result, we have less dishes, less wasted time and less wasted space due to managing the dirty dishes.  We also lost the typical sign that says, “Your mother does not work here! Please clean-up after yourself.”

Excess inventory leads to wasted time, wasted effort, and friction.  If you keep your backlog well groomed and focused on the valuable items, as Jean illustrates, you can keep from wasting valuable time.

This post is in honor of Greg Macaluso and Kevin Mindenhall, both manufacturing and distribution process consultants from Coopers & Lybrand.  In 1993, they taught me the way of JIT and Lean while working on an MRP project at Robinson Brick and a remittance processing project at U S WEST Communications.  In addition to tutalage, they had me read and flip the wonderful pictures of JIT, kanbans and manufacturing facilities with no horizontal space.  By removing the horizontal space to store stuff, the raw and work-in-process inventory went down and the throughput went up!