We felt the need to follow on from our previous blog on tracking testing results in the background using hidden ubiquitous spreadsheet or documents.  If all you have is a spreadsheet for tracking, then you make that visible to all relevant stakeholders.  If the company has a sanctioned or preferred way of handling “bugs” and […]

We break form our blog run on sprint meetings due to incoming flambé du jour. Sometimes we see organizations that are afraid to use the most fundamental of tools, for example, fault tracking from verification.  Instead of using a tracking and visibility tool, we pass back and forth excel sheets behind the scenes. Why would […]

“The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate” ~ Joseph Priestley In our experience, this is one of the significant benefits of the agile approach to project management.  Agile, with the recurring sprint meetings and constant involvement and participation by the project sponsor greatly facilitates the communications process. We can rely less […]

We like this saying: The problem is solved by the person feeling the pain; we see much merit in it and believe it to be an axiom. We have touched upon this a bit in our blog on sponges. We see areas where one part of the company or development process makes due or improvises […]

The customer is the receiver of the output; the customer can be an internal end customer or an intermediary to the next “chain” of events on the way to the final customer. Ultimately, we are aligning our actions (Suppliers, Inputs, Processes, and Outputs) in a way that provides the biggest benefits for our final customer. […]

Our organization’s structure can confound what constitutes and output.  Consider the company that is structured as a “functional” organization, the output from one group will typically go to another group in the system.  This organization structure is sometimes referred to as “silo” since each part of the company, group or department is segregated by expertise.  This has […]

Each process produces some sort of, at least intermediate output. The ultimate output will be the resultant of the series of inputs, processes and outputs, and will be directed toward the ultimate end customer. Therefore the ultimate output capability is the collection of all of the inputs and processes of the systems of the organization. […]

The process refers to the actions or activities we will take to achieve our objectives.  This link to specific objectives is essentially the rationale for the process. In our previous example, the Systems Engineering group may have requirements elicitation activities as well as concept generation and critique actions culminating in system requirements specifications.  These various […]

When we write about input, we are discussing the nature of the exchange to the depending group. The Systems Engineers, in our previous example, need some input from the Marketing staff to be able to design something to achieve the marketing personnel objective and subsequently meet the customer’s need.  What is that input? For example, […]

The next few blogs will be further elaborating on the systems concept of SIPOC.  Upon completion of the characters or phases in the systems thinking and chain of events (SIPOC itself), we will illustrate how we can use these to improve our organization’s capability. This post will treat “suppliers”. We are not referring to drug […]