Agility and inventory

This morning I take a plane from Paris to Monaco and the flight has been delayed for an uncommon reason an issue with the truck that has to push the plane to the lane of departure. We had to wait in the plane for more than an hour for our plane to be handled by a new truck.

Thinking about this lead me to tackle the subject of inventory and agility. Indeed, if there was an available truck, our plane could have taken of on time. It seems obvious that keeping some products in an inventory help bear an unforecast demand for that product. Some people would say that it is an obvious sign of agility (1) while some others would say that lean production and zero stock is far more agile (2) !
Probably agility is in the middle of this two first points of view depending of your business and the time it takes to be restocked.

In my truck case, the agile driver should have been careful concerning the level of gas. It had just run out of gas !

Welcome on this new blog about agility !

Let's go for a new blog on agility issue !

I should acknowledge it right now : I am a former (not so former after all) IT software engineer. I currently lead IT projects for my company. In fact, as you may know or not agility has been a real issue in IT projects for years and I have been interested in it for something like eight years. One of my favorite game is to try to apply on other area than IT agility ideas.

This blog will mainly focus on what agility means, what are the pros and cons of agility (yes there are some cons !!!), how can we effectively implement agility etc. I will indeed use my knowledge about different software methodologies like scrum, or eXtreme Programming. However the main aim of this blog is to share ideas about how to apply agility in different areas.

Perhaps we should begin by finding our own definition of agility !
What do agility means for you ?
I will try to summarize your point of view in my next message.