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Recent Posts: The Lean Thinker

What Is Your Target Story?

One of the artifacts of Extreme Programming as practiced by Menlo Innovations is the Story Card. In the purest sense, a story card represents one unit of work that must be done by the developers to advance the work on the software project. But the content and structure of the story card make it much …

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The Cancer of Fear

I am sitting in on a daily production status meeting. The site has been in trouble meeting its schedule, and the division president is on the call. The fact that a shipment of material hadn’t been loaded onto the truck to an outside process is brought up. The actual consequence was a small delay, with …

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LEI Book: Getting Home

“Are you ahead or behind?” seems an innocent enough question. But when asked by a Toyota advisor, the simple process of becoming able to answer it launched Liz McCartney and Jack Rosenburg on a journey of finding consistency in things that were “never the same” and stability in things that “always changed.” Getting Home is, first …

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It will feel worse because it’s getting better.

The line is starting to flow, or at least there is more time flowing than not flowing. The places where it isn’t flowing well are now much more evident. Things are speeding up. That is placing more stress on the engineering and materials supply processes where, before, they were shielded by a rough start-up that …

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That Broken Bolt is Speaking to You

The factory is running complex automated equipment. At the morning meeting today we heard “machine x was down for broken bolts.” Actually “again.” Background – the bolts in question resist pressure in molding equipment. The details of how the equipment works aren’t relevant here. This isn’t the first time I have heard of “broken bolts” …

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