Improvement Insights Blog
What’s Your Process Complexity?
Software complexity can be measured by the number of decisions and steps in a given module of code. The same is true of processes.
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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“Back when I was in software development way back in the 80s, there was a whole movement among software developers to look at how do we measure programmer productivity, software complexity and so on. There was a metric called McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity that said if you have more than 10 decisions in any given module, it starts to become unmaintainable. Once you reach about 50, it really becomes unmaintainable.
“So that’s McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity, but I got an idea from Mikel Harry‘s book that processes have a complexity, don’t they? Right? So, if you have a bunch of decisions and then workarounds and all this other kind of junk going on, and if you fill a whole conference room with Post-It notes of your little thing, the process complexity may exceed your ability to understand it or fix it.
“So, how do we start to drill that down? How do we take it down to something we can manage? How many steps in a process? How many decisions in a process? That’s what McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity was: How many decisions are in the process in the software. How many decisions are in there and how many workarounds and how many exceptions and how do we simplify that back to something we can really manage.
“So that’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go figure out what makes our processes complex, and then how do we simplify, streamline, and optimize that so it’s not that complex anymore.
“Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
