Thursday 4 June 2009

Value, Flow, Waste

I heard somebody talking about these three in the same sentence a couple of weeks ago and accidentally (or perhaps now) used them in a presentation draft while trying to explain what in Scrum we'd separate as functional/non-functional.. and waste although it doesn't seem to come up that often as the other two.
Anyway so I had to explain what it is as the word Value seem to be causing hiccups with some of our managers and the shorter explanation I could think of was that value is what we get money for, flow is what makes possible the production of value and waste is all that doesn't add to any of the other two so we throw it away.

I then ended up searching for more info and discovered 5 principles of lean (as opposed to the more famous 7). Here they are:

1. Specify value
2. Identify the value stream
3. Make value flow
4. Let customers pull
5. Pursue perfection (e.g. identify waste and eliminate continuously)

Ok, so the connection is that these 5 principles well explain the title as well and I am going to use them when I talk about it in about 10 days time. I may even post something about the event as it is my first ever agile project initiation boot camp.

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