Why Lean and Agile?

There are many reasons why an organization is moving to lean and agile ways of working. I have listed 4 here that I will examine in more detail throughout this post.

They are :

(1) Create Most Value

(2) Improve Responsiveness

(3) Build Quality in and

(4) Empower people

The first of these is “Create Most Value”.
What does this mean?
It means that we must understand our value flow. By understanding how we develop products for the customer we can identify activities that are wasteful — and eliminate them. We can identify the value adding activities and the non-value but necessary activities and make them more efficient. By focusing on customer value flow we can increase the speed with which we deliver to the customer.

Most importantly, we need to develop what the customer wants. This is difficult as very often the customer does not really understand what they want, so when they get it they don’t use it.

Now let’s take a look at the second reason why we are going to Lean and Agile ways of working: Improve Responsiveness.

We need to have processes that can accommodate change easily. We need to work closer with the customer, collaborate with them, demonstrate their features to them early and welcome the feedback and changes they provide. This way we will deliver exactly what they want. Agile methodologies provide us with a way to manage change easily.

The third reason why we are moving to Lean and Agile ways of working is “Build Quality In”.

Some of the costs of poor quality are:

Negative impact on our brand with our customers. If they perceive that we have poor quality products then they will be less inclined to take upgrades and our new releases in the future, causing us to maintain many older versions of our products.

Increased Technical Debt. If we take short cuts, for example, break the rules of our architecture to implement a quick solution then we need to go back and implement the correct solution later on. This adds time and slows down our productivity.

Increased time fixing faults — every fault that is not found and passes on to later stages takes time away from developing sellable features. We need to have a quality focus and determine what is “Right by me” before releasing our product to the nest stage of development.

Our development system as a whole but also in the more specific parts (such as e.g. for integration and for supply) build on high quality deliverables. Therefore, you should always strive for continuously keeping your system quality on the highest level, as high quality is an enabler for many aspects of the development system.

Everybody is responsible for quality in the Lean and Agile world. We build quality into everything we do.

The fourth reason why we are moving to these ways of working is to ”Empower our People”.

One of the key differences with this way of working is the way we treat our people. We often hear managers saying that they were agile or lean 20 years ago, just they never called it that. It is true that they may have been doing agile practices 20 years ago — like co-located cross functional teams, incremental development, short feedback loops etc however, the difference now is that this movement is all about the people. We need to truly empower our teams to deliver, this involves letting go of the command and control mentality, building strong bonds of trust, being more of a servant leader and developing your emotional intelligence.

The biggest difference now is that it is all about the people!

We need to truly empower our teams to deliver, this involves letting go of the command and control mentality, building strong bonds of trust, being more of a servant leader and developing your emotional intelligence.

There is a big difference in “doing” and “being” Lean and Agile. It is relatively simple to implement the Lean and Agile practices and to just do them. Many organisations have implemented Lean and Agile in this way. They put cross functional teams sitting together, put them on a training course, buy a few white boards and enforce an agile or lean way of working — there they are — Done!

Being Lean and Agile is a lot more difficult. This involves a complete mindset change. It is a move from a “command and control” leadership style to a “Servant-Leader” leadership style, creating an open, people centric organisation consisting of empowered teams.

We cannot focus on one (Being or Doing) more than the other, both parts are equally important.