You can read more about Takt Time and it’s place in the Toyota Production System here. You simply multiply the number of items required by the Takt Time.

Of course it also provides an easy way to work out how long it would take to produce large batches of items. At Toyota’s Melbourne plant for example, a Takt Time of 7 minutes would mean that a new finished Camry rolls off the line every 7 minutes.īy understanding Takt Time, a manufacturer is able to run the line at a pace that is in line with demand. In production line manufacturing, Takt Time is the rate at which each finished item completes manufacture. Takt Time describes the regularity of that beat, the time in between each. Takt is a German word for a rhythm or beat. The idea uses Takt Time and mathematic Monte Carlo estimation method to determine a probable range of delivery dates. In this post, I’m going to step through such an approach, one that I’ve been using with teams, to build a better picture of the likely delivery timeline of a medium-sized project. We always think we’ll be able to do it faster than we can and we always know that’s what people want to hear! Another wayĪn alternative to this approach is one that takes an “external” view of a team’s history and makes a forecast based on probabilistic simulation.

So while it’s a really useful discussion tool, it is common to find within the resulting delivery forecasts those human traits of over optimism and a desire to please the reader. Comparative estimation done well is a wonderful facilitator of good team conversations, but it’s still an opinion, tied to the team’s analysis of the task at hand.

Providing dependent and interested parties with a chance to organise around the release dateĪgile teams have tended towards comparative estimation, based on an idea made popular by Mike Cohn.

Having enough of an idea of the cost of delivery, in order to weigh that against the expected value derived from the effort.

Ultimately and broadly though, I think the usefulness of a project forecast boils down to two main things. To do so, the group must have agreed on how it will record it’s work, what that work is, what value it represents, what options there may be in the delivery of that value, and so on. There’s great value in the discussions needed to make such an assessment, to forecast a delivery schedule for a software project.

The idea that while it’s probably impossible, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Teams (and a manager) looking for ways to improve their assessment of the time required to deliver a software project.

InfoQ now has the talk I did on the Monte Carlo Method at Agile Australia (last year):īut look back through the history of this blog and you’ll see a couple of ever-present threads.

Monte carlo simulation download