Lead Time

Probabilistic Forecasting

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  • 3 min read

Probabilistic forecasting is an alternative to an estimates based approach. Rather than asking your teams to break down a lot of work up front, and then estimate it, we can use past data generated by the team from the work they’ve already done to extrapolate a forecast of what may happen… Read More »Probabilistic Forecasting

Little’s Law and CFDs

How much information can a triangle give you? Well, if it’s on a CFD (‘Cumulative Flow Diagram’), then it appears to be quite a lot. After sitting in a presentation recently, someone came up to me to ask how changes in WIP, Cycle Time and Delivery Rate alter the shape of… Read More »Little’s Law and CFDs

Little’s Law

What is Little’s Law? If you have a stable system (e.g. one-in-one-out), then the average number of customers you have within that system is equal to the average rate of customer arrivals multiplied by the average time a customer spends in the system. That was the law proposed by John… Read More »Little’s Law

Kanban Terminology

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  • 1 min read

When I first started looking into Kanban, I thought I understood what Lead Time, WIP and Throughput Rate meant. I discussed how to calculate them, use them and even produced a video explaining why limiting WIP makes sense referring to them. Then I got told by a bunch of experts… Read More »Kanban Terminology

Why limiting WIP makes sense

(updated with revised video on 7 October 2013) When I first got into Kanban, I really struggled to get my head around why limiting work in progress (WIP) made sense. The ‘experts’ were telling me that, by reducing the amount of work we were doing, we’d also reduce the time… Read More »Why limiting WIP makes sense