“If a developer ever has a choice between working on a feature or developer productivity, they should always chose developer productivity” Satya Nadella, quoted from Flow Engineering by Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis.

Improving daily work improves both the speed and quality of the work we produce. This benefits from compounding interest: by improving efficiency and quality today, we can leverage the extra capacity we gained to improve even more tomorrow. The starting point is to understand how work currently gets done, and what is the most impactful improvement we can do. This is key for being competitive in the marketplace.

post mortem

One of the ways to know the best places to improve is when we map the current way we work, and we notice a difference between Process Time (the time we spend doing the work) and Lead Time (calendar time of completing the work = Process Time + Waiting). From here, we’re able to target our improvement efforts to where they will yield the best business outcomes.