Yesterday’s weather – it’s only an approximation!

Very recently (yesterday to be precise) I published one of my shortest blogposts ever.

What happened? I used an estimation technique from the days of eXtreme Programming called “yesterdays weather.”

The basic idea is that it is rather probable – though not certain – that the future will resemble the past. I started writing regularly for this blog in 2013 and published a post every two weeks except for a time last year when I explicitly decided to let it rest for a while.
So it was a sound expectation that I would continue to publish every two weeks. On Sunday afternoons (European time).
Or so I thought. To add insult to injury I did not only violate agile principles (adjust the plan when the circumstances change), I also violated lean principles.
How so? Well, Of course I don't write all my pieces on Sunday afternoons, but instead on the days in between Sundays and set the the publishing date to Sunday afternoon. And fiddling with the publishing date in blogger (my blogging platform of choice - for now) is quite tedious. So I decided to increase the batch-size and create some inventory of already scheduled blogposts that I would ’only‘ have fill with the contents from my local drive.

Except that it didn't work out like that. I did not create the content in time, and all of the sudden the inventory became a liability. Since I didn't respond to the changed situation and the plan got carried out by bloggers scheduler, this actually went out to the market. Luckily it was only a “lorem ipsum” type of blogpost and not a vital product feature marked “to be defined before production” that went live...

Well, this blogpost from yesterday definitely reminded me, that the lean avoidance of overproduction (one of the seven wastes in Muda#Over-production)) really is a virtue... and that even though past experience is a strong indicator for tomorrows events, we still need to check the current circumstances on a regular basis.

till next time
  Michael Mahlberg

P.S.: To quote George Bernhard Shaw:
“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”