We currently spend significant time doing work that’s unrelated to delivering value to our customers. We attend an excessive number of meetings about planning and process. Problems fester for weeks or months before they are noticed, analyzed, and corrected. Careless team members are rewarded for pure speed, encouraging them to create costly bugs and submit incomplete work. Quality goes unchecked for weeks or months, which builds up an extensive amount of rework. Schedules slip as requirements change and work is reprioritized, which forces more meetings about planning and process and wastes the effort spent on abandoned work. In the end, our products are delivered late with less functionality and lower quality at higher cost. We used to just accept this outcome because we’ve always worked this way. However, we now feel we’ve found a simple and effective solution.