Thinking People System

A interactive website to better understand the Thinking People System.

Feature flow

The project

• 0 defect policy,
• has no external dependancies,
• the team has a strong opinion on Jidoka:
  • teams spot 100% of the defects,
  • teams do not take a feature who has defects,
  • the team who introduced the defect needs to rework on the feature.
• there is no limit on how many defects a feature can have.

Push system

When pushing all the feature as fast as possible, we make the assumption that we can deliver in (# step × # features = 150 days) if everything goes well. The fastest a team can do. We overburden but it's for the good cause. We pay everybody to work so if there is someone with nothing to do, we have to make him do something.

Pull system

We know that we will never reach the best score ever: the push system where everything goes right. But we limit overburden. We know we prefer waiting for next team to be ready before doing some extra work than having stock of feature pre-baked.

Pull system and daily problem solving

We invest days where we are not productive at all to investigate and learning from our mistake. We know that we will never reach the best score ever and we know that mistakes will reappear. So we take more time to understand and limit rework.

The more the team investigate, the more the team learn and start to be extremely good at problem solving.

Stock

Blue bins are your security stock, to make sure teams can work without any blockers. It's to make sure the next team will always have material to transform. But it comes with a cost: overburden, stagnation (increase lead time) and duplicated mistakes (not simulated here).

The less you have, the less your team has mental charge.

The more you have, the more secure you are to make teams work.

One solution: simplify your flow and lower the number of operation the teams have to do to deliver a feature.