Technology – Page 96

Who LSD is good for

What is it about Lean? It consists almost entirely of excellent and very practical notions, and yet for many of us, our first reaction when Lean ideas come along is an irrational desire to poke holes.

And so, you can imagine my joy: Last week’s column wondered why Lean would invade the hoary halls of accounting with its enlightened, queue-less (no, not clueless, queue-less) approach to process design, and then fail to advocate elimination of period closings as a wasteful batch-and-queue process design.

Too mean about Lean?

Valid inference?

Process design … serious, industrial strength process design … is an engineering problem, calling for engineering expertise.
Lean, Six-Sigma, Lean-Six-Sigma, and Theory of Constraints are all attempts to turn process improvement into serious engineering.
Software development methodologies are business processes, so it Just Makes Sense to try to apply these process design methodologies to it, doesn’t it?

Viewed from 50,000 feet, the logic chain looks good. Here on the ground, though, it’s far from certain.