Limitations of the industrial manufacturing paradigm, including Lean and ToC.

Be careful how we apply industrial manufacturing paradigms, including Lean and Theory of Constraints(ToC), to IT. Linear stream flow models only work in IT (or, I suspect, manufacturing), at a close scale. Zoom out and they fail us, its not linear any more, not even to an approximation.

The further you zoom out, the less any value network looks like a stream. They start to look like a braided river, complicated and constantly reshaping, with multiple paths around constraints.

And when you zoom out far enough it's a swamp or delta: complex co-creation with little detectable direction at all.

So by all mean use the models and tools, just use them judiciously.

Also, the models work better with identical widgets which software isn't. On a car, a bolt and an emission sensor are the same size and shape. Package, deliver, and install are the same. But design, build, and test are very different. In DevOps Continuous Delivery, deploys are fairly uniform packages, or can be made to be. But development never is. Every code challenge is unique and uncertain. Unpredictable. They look like the same size, but sometimes it's a bolt, sometimes an emission sensor.

Nor is it a good idea to have a linear production line mindset in a full build team. It wants to be more iterative and collaborative, messy even.

Finally, efficiency and speed are not our goals in the modern world. Flexibility and innovation are. Flexibility often decreases efficiency. Lean Six Sigma went out of vogue because "innovation became more valued than efficiency, and technical precision was no longer a differentiator." Standardisation and repeatability destroy diversity and innovation in the face of change.

All models are wrong. Some are useful. So it is with the manufacturing models of linear flow with constraints and wastes, buffers and ropes, cadences and queues. Make sure you have zoomed in close enough that a linear stream model makes sense.

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