Thomas Looy

Agile is an aggregation of many other management disciplines such as Lean Manufacturing , the Theory of Constraints and even Dr. Deming's work in Japan in Total Quality Management. One of the best tools for managing an Agile project and thus for teaching how these disciplines relate to the work done on an Agile project is the Agile Wall Chart or Story Card Wall. A Story Card Wall, similar to a Kanban Board in Lean Manufacturing, gives a snapshot of the project's status by displaying the status of each Story Card that makes up the backlog of the project.

This presentation illustrates, using an animated Agile Story Card Wall, the concepts of Lean’s Work in Progress, Drum–Buffer–Rope from Theory of Constraints and Systemic Thinking from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. The presentation, originally inspired by the MIT Beer Game, uses Flash animation to show the flow of story cards across a Story Card Wall over 10 iterations, demonstrating the effects on the team’s throughput as a result of a staffing decision made during the project. The presentation also includes an Excel spreadsheet to do ‘What If’ scenarios.

Target audience

Project Managers, Team Leads

Key benefits

Process optimization, systemic thinking.

Process / Mechanics

A discussion of the flow of story cards through the workflow of a system using an animated Agile Story Card Wall. An example of 'local optimization' will be introduced into the story flow that results in less than optimal performance of the project team. Metrics harvested from the animated story card wall will be captured and analyzed and what if scenarios using Excel will be run to determine a more optimal approach.

Resources

• The Beer Game - Application of Lean and Theory of Constraints Using an Agile Wall Chart at Agile 2009
• The Beer Game - Additional material used in the presentation