As a result, in the next few days each member puts in an extra effort and at the cost of hours overtime and a lot of stress, they manage to finish the sprint successfully (in the best case scenario).
Due to the fatigue that they’ve accumulated during the fourth week, at the beginning of the next sprint, they start slowly again and the cycle repeats.
The hockey stick effect can cause Mura in every context that has no regulated limits to the amount of work that can be in progress simultaneously.
Identifying Mura
There are two major ways to identify unevenness in your process by applying Lean:
- Visualizing your workflow on a Kanban board.
- Measuring your process stability with a cumulative flow diagram.
Shining a light on the workflow with Kanban
Visualizing your workflow is a logical first step for spotting unevenness in your process. The main tool in Lean for that purpose is the Kanban method.
It allows you to map your workflow on a board divided by columns that represent each step in your process. The more detailed you build it, the more comprehensive understanding you’ll have of the amount of Mura you’ve got in your process.
As every task that your team works on is hosted on a Kanban card, you can clearly see how much work is in progress and where it gets stuck. As a result, you’ll be able to identify problematic areas and take action to deal with the unevenness.
The most powerful weapon in the Kanban arsenal for dealing with Mura is the ability to put limits on the amount of work in progress both globally and for any particular stage of your workflow. This way you can ensure a steady flow of assignments and prevent unevenness.
However, placing the proper WIP limits is a tricky task and just looking at your Kanban board may not give you the answer.
Cumulative flow diagram for optimal process stability
The best way to gain a comprehensive understanding of the stability of your process is to draw a cumulative flow diagram.
Each band on the diagram is a representation of a stage in your workflow. As the bands progress over time, you need to monitor their width. If all bands on your cumulative flow diagram (except for the bottom one) are progressing in parallel then your progress is stable and you don’t have notable problems with Mura.
However, if the distance between the stages varies, then you’ve got work to do. Wider bands represent stages where work arrives faster than your team can process it and therefore these steps of your process become bottlenecks.
With that information at hand, you can come to an actionable conclusion where you need to place additional WIP limits to keep your process running all the time or increase capacity to alleviate a bottleneck.
Dealing with Mura on a team level is the easier part. However, when your whole organization has a problem with unevenness, things get more complicated.
Portfolio Kanban for Dealing with Mura on the Company Level
For many leaders, dealing with unevenness on a team level is enough to get rid of Mura.
However, establishing stable takts in your departments is not a guarantee that your company process will become steadier. Although the teams will work more efficiently, they may easily become bottlenecks to one another.
For example, let’s say that your development team has X capacity and a steady workflow. Your QA team has Y capacity that is < X and and has no problem with Mura. The developers will push more work than the quality officers can process and although both teams are efficient on their own, your overall development process will remain uneven.
The solution? Setting WIP limits on the Portolio level.
This can be a serious challenge if you can’t connect the different levels of your company process together into a single picture. The answer lies in the Portfolio Kanban method, which is a lesser-known approach to Kanban developed especially for global implementation.
With its help, you can create multiple layers of Kanban boards connected to each other. As a result, when breaking down company-wide (or anything larger than team tasks to be precise) initiatives, you can have a clear look at the evenness of your process.
You’ll have a concise view of how your teams are collaborating and will be able to smoothen any unevenness in your process as soon as it becomes evident.THATCHER – Eastern Arizona College’s Small Business Development Center announced two more webinars for small businesses.
The free webinars will cover the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan and Payroll Protection programs, and take place April 28 at 10 a.m. and April 30 at 2 p.m.
“We will provide the general information on both lending programs and what is required for the application process. There will be a question and answer time at the end of the webinar,” SBDC officials said in the announcement.
To register, go to http://www.eac.edu/SBDC/events.asp.
The Spectator summarizes a debate on that proposition. It sounds challenging.
Last evening members of VUW’s champion DebSoc entertained Cathy and me among former Weir House residents attending Weir’s 75th anniversary reunion. The moot was something like "I gained my real education at Weir House".
The debate was not intended to be challenging (and succeeded) but parts of it were very funny.
Myriad references to drunkenness were less entertaining than the two serious debates the Society offered during the election campaign, when the student debaters generally outshone the candidates (me included).
"…a man taking a woman out to dinner is paying to facilitate her desire for him. When he hires a prostitute he’s paying for the absence of her desire for him. "
"There are worse things to sell, she said, than your body. ‘Your child, your kidney, your soul.’ In comparison with ‘the whole panoply of exploitation that is the consumer society, prostitution is honest and innocent’"
The feature that most interested me was the audience adjudication.
Don’t Know 45"
I"d like to see more debates that change opinions. US presidential TV debates do not insult intelligence but our leaders’ TV debates are shame-inducing.
the northeast coast of Australia.
As he headed north along the east coast of Australia, the Endeavor was damaged as Cook navigated the treacherous and then uncharted Great Barrier Reef. While the ship was being repaired, the crew explored the area.
Australia provided more plants that were new to the botanists than any other place visited during the voyage. They collected so many that Joseph Banks was required to use special techniques to preserve them, laying them out on sails from the ship to dry in the sun. Here, as at every anchorage, Banks also collected greens to supplement the diet of the crew. Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) was not identified as the reason until the 20th century, but trial and error had proven the value of both citrus fruit and green vegetables against scurvy, and Cook applied that knowledge judiciously. He ordered his men to eat fresh greens when available; if they refused, they were occasionally flogged. This was the first long voyage to be distinguished by its success in losing no men to the dread disease.On Feb 12, at 22.20LT, a Colgan Air De Havilland Canada DHC-8-204 Q400, N200WQ, flying from Newark to Buffalo Niagara International Airport as Continental 3407 (CO3407), crashed 6.1 miles to the NE of BUF causing 49 dead (44 passengers, 4 crew members, 1 people on the ground). The aircraft crashed into a house at 6050 Long St., not far from the Clarence Center Fire Hall on Clarence Center Road. As a consequence, 12 houses had to be evacuated.
The aircraft was performing the ILS approach to runway 23. The last ackowledged transmission took place at 22.16Z and no Mayday call was made suggesting that the crew had little time to react to whatever had happened.
aircraft was at 1,500 feet AGL, at the absolute lowest, having been cleared to descend and maintain 2,300 while being given clearance for the ILS 23 approach (chart here: http:// |||IP_ADDRESS||| /d-tpp/0901/00065IL23.PDF).
Pilots and controllers in the Buffalo area reported icing conditions on arrivals and investigation will have to focus on ice as a possible factor of the mishap. Cactus 1452 reported icing 20 miles out of the field.
Someone speculated that the pilot seemed to be busy when replying for the last transmission to the Approach that had instructed CO3407 to contact TWR on 120.5, at around 22:16:08s LT. I have listened carefully to the ATC file (downloaded from liveatc.net at the above link) and I think it is too hard to understand if the female pilot acknowledged just “3407” to the Approach transimission because she was busy or because she was distracted by something else or not (a problem arising in the cockpit). The DHC-8 was in the last part of the approach, the crew was performing the last procedures to land the aircraft. Maybe they had already prepared the radio to be tuned to the TWR frequency and the pilot replied so fast, without saying anything else, because they had nothing more to say. Thousands of pilots all around the world ackwnoledge a change of frequency by simply trasmitting their flight number.
British Airways BA146 hard landing in London City Airport: is media over reacting to any aviation safety issue?
If you’re