Industrial Agile

A Waterfall In Dania Beach

This is a very exciting time for Big Orange Square! We’ve now got two training centers: one in Longmont, CO, and another in Fort Lauderdale, FL (technically it’s in Dania Beach, but it’s easier to just say Fort Lauderdale). The Longmont shop has been open for business for all of 2017, but while we’ve had our Fort Lauderdale location secured since March of 2017, our first class at that location did not take place until December 2017. While we have been through the build out process before we’re always curious about why these things take so long. At Big Orange Square, we say we can help you deliver “Twice the Product in Half the Time™,” which means the normal cycles we see in product development is generally four times longer than what it could be. Opening our shop in Florida has taught us a few things about why it has taken us four times longer to open than we’d originally hoped for. After an extensive and expensive plan submission/rejection/resubmission processes, we built the walls and roughed electrical and plumbing for the bathrooms. Here were the steps required for us to put up drywall:
  1. Schedule the plumbing inspector.
  2. If plumbing passes we can schedule the electrical inspector…
  3. If electrical passes we can schedule the framing inspector…
  4. If framing passes we can schedule the insulation inspector…
  5. If insulation passes we can dry wall and then request additional inspections, etc….
  6. Process Improvements Aren’t Just For Software Development Does this sequential waterfall process sound familiar?
I believe civil engineering can become more agile. We can bring the team-based approach of Scrum to the Permitting and Inspections Department, too. My hope is that, in addition to commercial endeavors, public services can realize and utilize the benefits we’re promoting. Although our shop was built with a waterfall in Dania Beach, it will operate with agility! When you need the extra edge during product development, it can be difficult to know where to turn. While there are many consulting groups out there, very few of them have the deep knowledge and experience making agile/Scrum work for many different kinds of business. There is no reason to be intimidated by agile when you have Big Orange Square on your side. When your team visits our training facilities, you’ll quickly be immersed in the unique agile/Scrum program that we have developed to make small firms competitive, viable, and efficient. If you’re curious about how our training works, learn more about it here. Contact us today to learn how Big Orange Square can teach your team to work and think more efficiently and effectively!

The Eclipse And Agile Principles

The Eclipse And Agile Principles​

This will be a quick blog, but it hits at an incredibly important principle that we all need to think about when we’re trying to make our processes as effective as possible. For this to make sense, you’ll need to know Agile Principle #10. This principle is all about simplicity: the art of maximizing the work not done.

 

Peter and Hubert demonstrated this principle with pictures of the solar eclipse. Each one of them used different tools to do the same thing: see the total solar eclipse that passed over the United States on August 21st, 1017 from our training center in Longmont, CO.

Peter used a cereal box. It’s simple, and it worked. Using it, Peter was able to (safely) see the moon pass in front of the sun. The projected image was small and lacked detail, but it cost basically nothing.

 

Hubert is more sophisticated (or so he thinks), so he used a telescope. The picture is much larger and more detailed than the one through the cereal box, though the telescope was far more expensive than a box of cereal.

Consider value: if value is defined as having an amazing experience, is Hubert’s scope (with its substantial price tag) really worth it, or was simply being close enough to the path of totality to experience an incredibly rare and strange darkening of the sky for a few minutes all that was needed? If we want to study solar prominences, Peter’s cereal box really won’t give us enough data to even start, and for that matter, if we want to take it very seriously, is Hubert’s investment of the telescope even enough? As you can see, there are several ways to look at how this agile principle is important when thinking about your business. The eclipse is a great way for us to remember to do the most simple thing that could possibly work — not anything more simple.

 

We hope you had a great experience with the eclipse, both Peter and Hubert did! If you’ve been searching for a way to push your team to the next level through the application of agile/Scrum principles, contact us at Big Orange Square today. With training centers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Longmont, Colorado, we are ready to help your team embrace lean process improvements in software or industrial design. We guide your group through a number of projects where everyone actually gets hands-on to develop and create something. Time and time again, our clients have seen this kinesthetic learning yield great returns in process improvement and design time. Work with us and you’ll see how we can help you get “Twice the Product in Half the Time.™”

 

How To Manage Trade-Offs In Design

How To Manage Trade-Offs In Design

Budgets: It’s Not Just Money That Is Scarce

By Hubert Smits

The Hyperloop, a high-speed transportation system initially proposed by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is one of the most exciting technological propositions in recent history. To accelerate its development, SpaceX announced an open competition for engineering teams to design their own Hyperloop pods to compete on a test track in 2016. Formed on social media site reddit, rLoop is the only non-student team to reach the final stage of the competition.

Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to work with these dynamic, brilliant and very dedicated volunteers.

The Challenge:

The rLoop team wondered whether all their parts would fit into the available space of the pod. For example, extra batteries would make it easier to design magnets and brakes, but they add weight and take up space. Stronger magnets produce more heat, which is difficult to get rid of in a vacuum. The challenge was how to handle the trade-offs needed in this situation.

The Solution:

My proposal was to treat the scarce resources like money: lay out a budget for the use of a resource. With 100Ah of electricity available for all the power consuming parts inside of the pod, decisions had to be made: 40Ah to levitation, 30Ah to braking, 20Ah to logic, 10Ah to spare.

Just like in your household budget, you can shift allocation. For example, less money for vacation, more for the new car. In the rLoop environment, it may be more power for levitation, less for braking. Some of those trade-offs are needed. The magnets may not be able to lift the weight of the pod, so something has to give (like you give up your vacation when the car breaks down). Others might enable more elaborate solutions. Teams can negotiate and haggle about the use of the budget. Ever done that with your family members?

The trade-offs are more complex than your household budget because different budgets influence each other. For example, the need for more power may dictate bigger batteries, which influences the weight budget. Now negotiating a power budget becomes more difficult: more teams are involved and more factors need to be taken care of.

Just like other reports in Scrum (Burn-down and Burn-up charts), the main goal of managing the budget is to give warnings when a budget is challenged. The Scrum Master can issue the warning and the team has to find a solution.

Here are some photos I took while working with the rLoop team:

This is the brake system this team developed from scratch. It is one one of the reasons they were recognized with the Innovation Award.
This tube is the model required for the SpaceX test flights. It is 25% of the real pod.
These drawings are the documentation linked to the Scrum task board.

Go Deeper

More about rLoop. rLoop is an open-source, crowdsourced, online think tank. Visit their website: www.rloop.org

Burn-down and Burn-up Charts
“The team displays, somewhere on a wall of the project room, a large graph relating the quantity of work remaining (on the vertical axis) and the time elapsed since the start of the project (on the horizontal, showing future as well as past). This constitutes an “information radiator,” provided it is updated regularly. Two variants exist, depending on whether the amount graphed is for the work remaining in the iteration (“sprint burndown”) or more commonly the entire project (“product burndown”).” — AgileAlliance.com