Showing results by author "Clarke Ching" in All Categories

A large software-intensive project, called FPP, that has been running late since day 1, but now, suddenly, needs to launch on an impossibly early date, or else. You feel their pain, and their joy, as they battle problem after problem until, slowly, torturously, they rediscover the few - but fundamental - principles underlying successful commercial software development.

The world's best manufacturers have known the secret for decades: Every workplace, big or small, has one resource that is slower than the rest. It’s called the bottleneck. Find it, speed it up, and your entire workplace speeds up. The problem is that although this secret is well known inside manufacturing, it's been hidden from the rest of us, deep inside complicated manufacturing texts and sophisticated computer algorithms. Until now, that is. Clarke Ching, author of Rolling Rocks Downhill, has spent the last 20 years adapting and simplifying manufacturing's techniques so that everyone can use them, no matter where they work.

What if you could easily get 80% of the benefits of agile without changing how you build software? This is a business parable about agile project management that never mentions the word "agile". Bob Billington has a problem: he's about to lose his job because the economy has taken a sudden nosedive, taking the big project he is working on with it. Bob, a natural-born problem solver, starts asking questions, the first being, "What does it take for a project to be commercially viable in a recession?"