I finished this book in January 2025. I recommend this book 10/10.
Why you should read this book:
This is a novel with a handbook at the end. The story is about implementing a manufacturing approach to software development and IT. The book explains how you can use the Kanban principle from Toyota and focuses on how work flows through an organization with knowledge workers without creating bottlenecks, and as with software, many times, it is only one person who can solve a coding problem.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
The manufacturing process works in knowledge work.
Kanban—Swarming—Improving.
Think like a plant manager as a leader.
📝 My notes and thoughts
P96. 'In my mind, I've done a good job of being the competent and passionate manager who is dispassionately struggling to decide how to best serve the business without making moral judgments. Steve replies in an exasperated voice, "What kind of bullshit prioritization question is this? If I went to my board and told them that I need to do either sales or marketing, and asked them which of those I should do, I'd be laughed out of the the room. I need to do both, just like you need to do both! Life is tough. Phoenix is the top company priority, but that doesn't mean you get to hold the sox-404 audit hostage."'
P161. 'I tell him about my attempts to get some sort of change process going and my attempt to elevate the discussion above how many fields there were on the change form, which then resulted in getting people to put their intended changes on index cards and our need to juggle them on the board. "Very good," he says, "You've put together tools to help with the visual management of work and pulling work through the system. This is a critical part of the First Way, which is creating fast flow of work through Development and IT Operations. Index cards on a Kanban board are one of the best mechanisms to do this because everyone can see WIP. Now you must continually eradicate your largest sources of unplanned work, per the Second Way." Until now, having been so wrapped up in defining what work is, I had forgotten about Erik and his Three Ways. I dismissed them before, but I now listening closely to his every word.'
P195. 'He asked on what basis do we decide whether we can accept a new project. When I said that I didn't know, he took me on another tour of MRP-8 manufacturing plant. He took me to Allie, the Manufacturing Resource Planning Coordinator, and asked her how she decides on whether to accept a new order." I flip back to my notes. "She said that she would first look at he order and then look at the bill of materials and routings. Based on that, she would look at the loadings of the relevant work centers in the plant and then decide whether accepting the order would jeopardize any existing commitments. "Erik asked me how we made the same type of decision in IT," I recall. "I told him then, and I'll tell you now, I don't know. I'm pretty sure we don't do any sort of analysis of capacity and demand before we accepts work. Which means we're always scrambling, having to take shortcuts, which means more fragile application in production. Which means more unplanned work and firefighting in the future. So, around and around we go." To my surprise, Erik interrupts. "Well put, Bill. You've just described 'technical debt' that is not being paid down. It comes from taking short-cuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn't pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work. "As you know, unplanned work is not free," he continues. "Quite the opposite. It's very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of ..." He looks around professorially for an answer. Wes finally speaks up, "Planned work?"'
P209. "Every work center is made up of four things: the machine, the man, the method, and the measures. Suppose for the machine, we select the heat treat oven. The men are the two people required to execute the predefined steps, and we obviously will need measure based on the outcomes of executing the steps in the method." I frown. These factory terms are vaguely familiar from my MBA years. But I never thought they'd be relevant in the IT domain.
P211. "What you're building is the bill of materials for all the work that you do in IT Operations. But instead of a list of parts and subassemblies, like moldings, screws, and casters, you're cataloging all the prerequisites of what you need before you can complete the work—like laptop model numbers, specifications of user information, the software and licenses needed, their configurations, version information, the security and capacity and continuity requirements, yada yada..." He interrupts himself saying, "Well, to be more accurate, you're actually building a bill of resources. That's the bill of materials along with the list of the required work centers and the routing. Once you have that, along with the work orders and your resources, you'll finally be able to get a handle on what your capacity and demand is. This is what will enable you to finally know whether you can accept new work and then actually be able to schedule the work."
P212. "Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work."
P213. Turn your attention from the work centers to all the space between the work centers. Just as important as throttling the release of work is managing the handoffs. The wait time for a given resource is the percentage that resource is busy, divided by the percentage that resource is idle. So, if a resource is fifty percent utilized, the wait time is 50/50 or 1 unit. If the resource is ninety percent utilized, the wait time is 90/10, or nine times longer. "A critical part of the Second Way is making wait times visible, so you know when your work spends days sitting in someone's queue—or worse, when work has to go backwards because it doesn't have all the parts or requires rework.
P231. "Here's another thing we can learn from manufacturing, I think," she continues. "We're doing what Manufacturing Production Control Departments do. They're the people that schedule and oversee all of production to ensure they can meet customer demand. When they accepts an order, they confirm there's enough capacity and necessary inputs at each required work center, expediting work when necessary. They work with the sales manager and plant manager to build a production schedule so they can deliver on all their commitments."
P249. He picks up a thin, black three-ring binder that was open on his desk, sits back down across from us, and shows us the open binder. "Here are two slides I look at every day. These are the company goals and the objective I've set for finance," he explains. "I've learned that while the finance goals are important, they're not the most important. Finance can hit all our objectives, and the company still can fail. After all, the best accounts receivables team on the planet can't save us if we're in the wrong market with the wrong product strategy with an R&D team that can't deliver." "So what's on the second slide, which shows what I believe are the more important company goals. I look at this slide every day."
1-CFO GOALS
Health of company
Revenue
Market share
Average order size
Profitability
Return on assets
Health of Finance
Order to cash cycle
Accounts receivable
Accurate and timely financial reporting
Borrowing costs
2-Company GOALS
Are we competitive?
Understanding customer needs and wants: Do we know what to build?
Product portfolio: Do we have the right products?
R&D effectiveness: Can we build it effectively?
Time to market: Can we ship it soon enough to matter?
Sales pipeline: Can we convert products to interested prospects?
Are we effective?
Customer on-time delivery: Are customers getting what we promised them?
Customer retention: Are we gaining or losing customers?
Sales forecast accuracy: Can we factor this into our sales planning process.
P294."You've got to stop thinking like a work center supervisor. You need to think bigger, like a plant manager. Or better yet, think like the person who designed this manufacturing plant and all of the processes it relies upon. They look at the entire flow of work, identify where the constraints are, and use every possible technology and bit of process knowledge they have to ensure work is performed effectively and efficiently. They harness their 'inner-Allspaw.'" I'm about to ask what he means by an "Allspaw," when he just waves my question away. "In manufacturing, we have a measure called takt time, which is the cycle time needed in order to keep up with customer demand. If any operation in the flow of works takes longer than the takt time, you will not be able to keep up with customer demand."
P301. I indicate to Brent and Wes that one of them should continue where William left off. Brent gets up and starts drawing boxes to indicate the packaging of the code for deployment; preparing new server instances; loading and configuring the operating system, databases, and applications; making all the changes to the networks, firewalls, and load balancers; and then testing to make sure the deployment completed successfully. I contemplate the entirety of the diagram, which surprisingly reminds me of the plant floor. Each of these steps is like a work center, each with different machines, men, methods, and measures.
P391. The First Way enables fast left-to-right flow of work from Development to Operations to the customer. In order to maximize flow, we need to make work visible, reduce our batch sizes and intervals of work, build in quality by preventing defects from being passed to downstream work centers, and constantly optimize for the global goals. By speeding up flow through the technology value stream, we reduce the lead time required to fulfill internal or customer requests, especially the time required to deploy code into the production environment. By doing this, we increase the quality of work as well as our throughput, and boost out ability to out-experiment the competition. The resulting practices include continuous build, integration, test, and deployment processes; creating environments on demand; limiting work in process (WIP); and building systems and organizations that are safe to change. The Second Way enables the fast and constant flow of feedback from right to left at all stages of our value stream. It requires that we amplify feedback to prevent problems from happing again, or enable faster detection and recovery. By doing this, we create quality at the source and generate or embed knowledge where it is needed—this allows us to create ever-safer systems of work where problems are found and fixed long before a catastrophic failure occurs. By seeing problems as they occur and swarming them until effective countermeasures are in place, we continually shorten and amplify our feedback loops, a core tenet of virtually all modern process improvement methodologies. This maximizes the opportunities for our organization to learn and improve. The Third Way enables the creation of a generative, high-trust culture that supports a dynamic, disciplined, and scientific approach to experimentation and risk-taking, facilitating the creation of organizational learning, both from our successes and failures. Furthermore, by continually shortening and amplifying our feedback loops, we create ever-safer systems of work and are better able to take risks and perform experiments that help us learn faster than our competition and win in the marketplace. As part of the Third Way, we also design our system of work so that we can multiply the effects of new knowledge, transforming local discoveries into global improvements. Regardless of where someone performs work, they do so with the cumulative and collective experience of everyone in the organization.
P394. In-depth description of the 3 ways.
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