Flow Beyond Engineering
The same queueing arithmetic, pointed at the rest of the business: hiring, procurement, legal review, the month-end close, marketing production and support. Little’s Law does not know what is in the queue.
Diagnose any function in the business the way you would a delivery team.
Practitioner
4Marketing Production And Campaign Flow
Creative production is a value stream whose dominant wait state is approval. How to design review rather than resent it, why simultaneous campaigns slow all of them, and how to measure output without gaming it.
10 min readmarketingcreative productionThe Month End Close As A Batch Problem
The close is the largest batch in most businesses. Treating it as a batch size problem rather than a resourcing problem explains why it takes as long as it does and what actually shortens it.
10 min readfinancemonth end closeWhen The Form Sets Your Batch Size
The advice to reduce batch size assumes batch size is yours to choose. Sometimes the medium imposes a floor — you cannot ship a quarter of an episode, half a filing or a partial print run. What changes is the advice, not the economics.
7 min readbatch sizetransaction costYour Hiring Pipeline Is A Queueing System
Time-to-hire is a distribution, not an average. Open requisitions are work in progress, the interview loop is usually the constraint, and scheduling is a batch delay you can design away.
9 min readhiringrecruitment
Advanced
3Failure Demand And What Your Support Queue Is Telling You
John Seddon's distinction between value demand and failure demand turns a support queue into a defect signal for the whole business. How to classify it, who should own the fix, and why handle time is the wrong target.
10 min readfailure demandcustomer serviceProcurement And Legal Review As Constraints
The two queues that silently gate everything else. Why adding buyers and lawyers rarely helps, how risk tiering and pre-approved templates reduce work in progress, and how to measure a function whose job is partly to say no.
10 min readprocurementlegalPublished Commitments And The Debt You Cannot Refactor
Technical debt can be refactored because you own both sides of it. Anything you have published — an API, a price, a filing, a plot point, a licence — is coupling to people outside your control, and it only ever accumulates.
7 min readcouplingtechnical debt
Other domains