I had the opportunity to work with Infoworld on this video illustrating how agile development is a lot like running a restaurant.
Restaurants requires operational excellence to deliver high quality meals, excellent service, and on time delivery to restaurant patrons. They also require some creativity and innovation when developing new menu items and adjusting ingredients based on what’s available. Lastly, running restaurants requires significant teamwork between “front office” staff tending to customer and “back office” cooks working to prepare the meal.
Restaurants leverage and sometimes develop their own technology to develop the product. Cooks have generalized skills like knife skills and specialized skills like baking. Kitchens have to be safe and clean to meet regulatory requirements. Sound like software development?
The video speaks to kanban and scrum processes, although it applies sprints to both which technically isn’t correct. It speaks to the importance of retrospectives to improve process and using automation to make teams more efficient.
If you have a new team learning agile development, scrum, or kanban, then have them watch the video!
Learning about Agile Development and Scrum
Some of my other agile and scrum articles at Infoworld:
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