This package is a part of The Presence Calculus Project: an open source computational toolkit that is intended to make sample path methods and concepts more accessible to practitioners working on operations management problems in the software industry including engineering/product/sales/marketing operations and related disciplines: value stream management, developer experience and platforms, and lean continuous process improvement.
This library and toolkit is intended to be used by practitioners to understand the theory and develop their intuition about the dynamics of flow processes, using their own environments. Understanding the context behind the data greatly helps makes the abstract ideas here concrete and there in no substitute for getting your hands dirty and trying things out directly. This toolkit is designed for that.
It is not ready nor intended to support production quality operations management tooling.
You will get the most benefits out of this library in the near term by using it to look closely and carefully, at how flow processes in your environment behave and evolve using the machinery of this package and learning how to model them.
The toolkit is intentionally designed to be low-tech and force you think about how to model flow processes in a complex system more broadly before jumping to talking about metrics and building dashboards.
You should be able to apply it anywhere you can extract a csv file with start and end dates for various operational processes using the native reporting tools built into the production tools you use today.
Compare what you see here, with whatever your current operational dashboards show today and think about the differences. It will soon become apparent why sample path analysis represents a fundamentally different way of thinking about flow and operations management.
We will continues to provide more examples and talking about applications in The Polaris Flow Dispatch so it becomes easier to imagine the possibilities. But the potential applications are really very large so we welcome contributions from others who have interesting examples to show once they grasp the ideas here and understand why they matter.
The barrier to modeling and measuring a flow process using this toolkit are minimal. So please try it out and see what you find. I would love to publish your use cases. Please raise a PR to tell us if you have a novel use case and show us how you are using these techniques.
We plan to extend this library to support the analysis of general flow processes, which allow arbitrary functions as marks, and are governed by the H=λG form of Little’s Law. This will allow us to directly model the economic impacts of flow processes.
We do not plan to directly implement online analysis of real time flow processes in this package nor build web apps or UIs here in this package. It will remain an offline, command line toolkit for the foreseeable future.
However, the underlying modules implement the low-level machinery and code required to build these more production ready and richer applications, and our licensing permits you to build those applications using the concepts in this package if you so desire.