Abstract: Your delivery team may be focused on continuously tuning their CI/CD pipeline but who is focusing on the business pipeline?
If your delivery team is not always producing new functionality at the rate you want, the bottleneck might not be in the way they’re working. Imagine a software development factory that can’t get the raw materials it needs in time to keep production humming.
The Theory of Constraints (ToC) adopts the idiom of “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link”. Delivery teams need the right requirements (chunks of work) at the right time.
“What?” you say. “I’m already working as hard as I can to provide them with complete requirements specifications.” I believe you. Salah and George can help you notice some issues that might have escaped your attention. And they can help you address those issues in ways that may save you some work.
Questions that may be helpful to consider are:
- What makes it so challenging to provide the information the delivery team needs at the time they need it?
- What causes our business pipeline to be broken? In manufacturing, identifying bottlenecks may be obvious but what about knowledge work?!
- What’s hidden that could cause delays and create a state of learned helplessness?
This presentation will explore the challenges that stems from the discovery and explore ideas to consider for building a healthy business pipeline. At the end of this session, you will be able to identify the bottlenecks using the drum buffer rope and learn about the 3 amigos and clarification through examples (acceptance scenarios) and techniques to alleviate the bottlenecks.
Learning Outcomes: - Define what the business pipeline is
- Introduce the drum buffer rope (DBR) that’s derived from the theory of constraints (TOC) as a possible solution
- Identify the challenges with the business pipeline
- Ideas on how to fix the business pipeline.
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