Austin's Community of Practice for Kanban, Kaizen, Second-Generation Agile, and Lean Software Development
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Any technique that is rooted in manufacturing – like 5S – can be challenging to understand and apply to software work.
5S applied naively to knowledge work can be disastrous. The stories of 5S consultants “optimizing” with enforced standards for the placement of office supplies on desks give 5S a bad name. Don’t let the 5S horror stories ruin it for you, though.
5S helps us to see a more meaningful role of “standards” and “standardization”, including understanding when to adapt standards.
At a more profound level, 5S helps to cultivate the environment and behaviors that help software workers to see mistakes before they happen, and to understand how subtle and constant mistakes manifest continuously. It also helps knowledge transfer become more visible in software work.
Join this Lean Software Austin conversation and see how 5S can both help and harm your software efforts, and learn how to avoid the traps.
Scott is a tenacious pursuer of root causes, whether in organizational design, work design, or software and product design. He’s an indomitable challenger of status quo, entrenchment, and anything that gets in the way of breakthroughs and improvements. While a self-admitted “average programmer”, he is a teacher, student, organizer, and activist who strives to communicate simple and powerful software development topics that become calcified by esoteric ideas and language.
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