Understanding the difference between PUSH and PULL

Push vs Pull

Our friend Manuel Palachuck just published a blog post on Push vs Pull that I thought explains it quite clearly. It is a big cultural and organizational change from traditional management methods (dispatch, scheduling, Gantt charts, etc). This is what we are implementing in our own office, and also applies to any team including sales.

“A major consideration when adopting the Agile Service Delivery methodology is that it is a pull system and not a push system. This simply means that the team is constantly pulling work from the backlog versus it being heaped upon them as with conventional service delivery methods. Utilizing a pull versus push system does not preclude the scheduling of work, it simply means the default is to rely on the team pulling work from the backlog as a default.

“Probably the greatest and most noticeable benefit to a pull system is that the techs and engineers are not stacked end to end with work to the point they can’t see an opening to get anything done that they may need to do, like filing a report or mentoring a teammate. With a push system, everything must be scheduled and if everything doesn’t fit, we tend to cram things in and make them fit. Conversely, a pull system allows large and time-bound things to be scheduled while leaving plenty of room for the individual and team to be much more dynamic in how they handle the larger pool of backlog issues.”

There is more to Lean (a method for cutting waste and delays out of how work moves) and Agile (working in short cycles and adjusting as you go; it suits service and project teams, not only software) then this, but its a simple description for those who are completely new to these concepts.