Delta and Northwest declare bankruptcy. What can software prople learn from this?

From New York Times

Southwest's chief, Gary C. Kelly, said airlines could not grow and become profitable by making workers pay the price.

"If you don't treat your people right, you pay the price," said Mr. Kelly, whose unionized airline pays some of the highest wages in the industry, even though its overall costs are among the lowest.

Mr. Kelly, whose low-fare airline has a higher market capitalization than all its major rivals combined, likewise had little sympathy for the pain that fuel prices had inflicted on Northwest and Delta.

Southwest is a Lean-Thinking airline. They know how to generate ...

... Value for their customers. And they know that generating Value is not merely about cutting all costs. You can cut costs until your out of business.

Southwest measures value differently too. Other airlines optimize on having full flights, buy using the hub-and-spoke approach. Southwest only flys point-to-point and optimzes on turn-around time while on the ground.

Two different management appraoches, one measures utilization of resources, the other Value as preceived by the customer.

Optimizing utilization of resources for software teams is when managers try to make sure everyone is always working on something, no matter if it is truely valuable. In Lean-Thinking this is actually increases waste.

In Lean-Software Development, we optimize on the Value of features being produced. It really does not matter if everyone is working all the time or not. The important thing is that the team as a whole is producing Value as fast as possible.

There are many reasons that management too often focuses on the resources rather than the Value. We'll save that for another time.