Can design engineers benefit from empirical process control methods? Some have suggested we use pull planning. I thought for a time that we might figure out the kanban flow for the design workflow or employ the scrum framework.
- Kanban
- Scrum
- Engineering Project Management
- engineering consulting - civil engineering
Did you know that visual and special effects studios invest time to plan work "pipelines" for each new project? In my work as a civil engineer, we tend to just get to work following the steps we learned for specific objectives. Rarely do we sit down as a team and examine our overall work flow.
I worked for Hatch Mott MacDonald for several years and (after Hatch and Mott MacDonald split the venture) only learned that Hatch had a generalized work flow when I was leaving.
To apply lean principles and to create a learning agile organization, we seem to need to step back and examine overall work flows and how teams collaborate and interact; how teams share and hand-off information. Looking at engineering consulting, we could examine it as a kanban flow shown in the attached Workflow Diagram.
 WorkflowDiagram | [PDF of full diagram -- not paged] | 112 kB |