COVID-19, Agile and Theory of Constraints
Note: I had this story for almost 9 months sitting on my Draft folder. Today I bumped into it, and decided to put it out, no matter what. Hope it’s still contemporary and useful.
The pandemic and lockdown nowadays is an accepted reality, and we receive everyday news about how each country has been taming this Ghost War.
I watched an interesting video from BBC News Brasil recommending how Brasil should learn from other countries on fighting this pandemic war that we must and will definitely win.
So, one of the concepts explained in the video lies in protecting the Health System by squashing the curve of the number of people using the Health System.
The countries that are winning the pandemic, are the ones that protect the Health Systems and proactively attack the pandemic outside the Hospitals.
In the case of Japan and Korea, their strategy was to proactively tracking people with the virus and isolating them, protecting in this way the Health System, and leaving the Health System to take care of the really needed people for hospital treatment.
There’s no silver bullet for all countries, so I wish all succeed whatever method they apply.
Learning from Life
While we all try to carry on our professional life’s working physically or remotely, carrying our duties to keep our society running, I cannot stop learning from this global situation.
This story above brought me back to what I’ve learned from The Phoenix Project. The book, inspired by another book The Goal, talks about a core principle to increase the throughput of a production system by addressing its constraints. The concept behind this was studied in what is known as the Theory of Constraints, which is a simple way basically states that
“a chain is no stronger than its weakest link”
Applying into Professional Life
Since Agile Methodologies took over the IT industry the Data Engineering, projects find it amusing putting developers team to sprint every 2 weeks. Nothing better than having employees “running” to meet the business goals, that is what Management Excellency for many means. What is asked from the team is not to run, but to sprint :-).
In the Phoenix book, the good use of the Theory of Constraints consisted in limiting the WiP (Working in Progress), and that was the key to increase the throughput.
One of the most forgotten chapters on Agile is that is important to limit WiP, a similar problem of Health Systems fighting the COVID-19.
Below, you can find the same graph but applied to the Agile, where every stakeholder wants every little feature for the next Program Increment. In this case the Constraint is the Development Team.
The traditional stakeholders, the same ones that say that Agile does not work, are the first ones to jump and try to asphyxiate the system, overload the constraint, and prove that they were the all-time right about Agile, or to abuse it as most as it can make it sprint unrealistic goals.
How to change
FOR THIS TO CHANGE, I recommend my everyone research, educate and train for a new reality that is here to stay. Learn how to take advantage of this new reality.
Training and Books
- Software Architecture Foundations — excellent trading for Architecture on Agile Development
- The book The Power of the Agile Business Analyst — 30 surprising ways a business analyst can add value to your Agile development team, where you can find a myriad of advices to adapt to this new work with the fast pace of change.
- Liberating Structures a powerful methodology to engage people in interactions.
More on my playlist https://learning.oreilly.com/playlists/671e2ce7-d57f-486e-91e7-ff1cb3c035e0/
About the Future
I am sure we will fight and win this pandemic because it is impossible to invert the flow of a river in the opposite direction and Humanity will always win, eventually, it will need to adapt as never done before to fight this new threat and live in this new reality.
Professionally, luckily, I‘ve been surrounded by excellent professionals and having good supporting management that understands that this is a journey, and transformation does not happen overnight, it’s a transformation journey.
Let me know what you’ve learned from this pandemic situation, and some of your references for training, books and videos.
And stay safe
