About LEAN and Agile. Advice for a first step to start a mind shift in your team.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn on February 26, 2020. Migrated to Medium and edited on September 2022.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lean-agile-advice-first-step-start-mind-shift-your-team-cesar-miguel/
People tend to forget that Agile derives from Lean, and most of the ideas are transferable between both. Here is a quick overview of LEAN and Agile. Understating both will help shed some light on the cornerstone to start a true culture/mindset transformation journey.
ABOUT LEAN
Lean manufacturing is a set of principles for quality achieving, speed in delivery and alignment with customer. How? removing waste and minimising risk, while maximising the value for the customer.
Lean is inspired by Toyota’s production system, “the Toyota way” dating way back to the 1930s, before PCs, before software as we know it…
7 principles
Let’s focus on the top 3 ones:
- Lean’s obsession is removing everything that doesn’t add value. Waste can take many forms: inefficient process, useless meetings, documentation (slides!), complex decision making/committees… even multitasking is inefficient (you can look for articles about “context changing” if you want to learn more). When trying to put value in the hands of the customer as fast as possible, the real question is not how to deliver things faster, but how to remove whatever is holding the team back.
- Quality must be everyone’s job, not just QA’s. Keep constant feedback from customers and experts and make developments incremental.
- People on the front line, doing the actual work, know better how to do it. Management decisions should be limited to the “what”, not the “how”.
If you want to dig further, don’t hesitate to take a look here.
ABOUT AGILE
Agile is not a methodology, it is not a technique, and Agile is not (necessarily) SCRUM… Agile is an iterative philosophy born in the early 2000s (birth of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development) aiming to achieve flexibility and capacity to react to change fast, by building incrementally, delivering in small packages.
While LEAN was mainly focused on processes and production lines, Agile expanded to a more human/team-centered approach (sometimes Agile seems a little too permissive human-wise vs business-wise) and mainly for software development, but can easily be extended to any product or service.
4 values
12 principles
A multitude of tools, grouped in frameworks
I cannot quote all the tools at your disposal to ensure these 4 values and 12 principles: daily stand-ups, retrospectives, client demos, grooming, peer reviews, visual management, peer coding…
And some of these tools are grouped in what is called frameworks, like SCRUM, Kanban… These frameworks may superset the Agile Manifesto adding new principles or rules.
AGILE VS LEAN
If you carefully read all the points in both, you must have seen the similarities… what Agile inherited from lean, and how both mindsets are extremely similar:
- Both advocate for smaller iterative developments.
- Both advice to get customer feedback as soon and as frequently as possible.
- Both advice to decentralize the decision process and trust the people actually doing the job to take the best decision on how to do it.
- But if you had to keep just one thing in mind: quality is at the heart of both approaches, and quality is mainly obtained through continuous improvement (Lean manufacturing event gave it a name: Kaizen, or “change for good”).
Of course, if you continue documenting yourself on both approaches you will see the big differences between both, mainly on the focus… For example:
- Lean focuses on processes, while Agile focuses on products
- Agile is meant for changing product, putting emphasis on the capacity to react fast
- Lean is meant for a known, rather invariable product (it was born for the production lines that do not change product often), putting emphasis on optimizing (reducing waste)
DOING AGILE VS BEING AGILE
And here is the tricky part about Agile: since Agile is a philosophy, a mindset, it is not because you use a framework or tool (SCRUM for example) that your team or organisation is truly Agile…
First step to start a cultural transformation
If you are trying to introduce Agile into your team or company but are struggling because of rigidity, old-fashioned processes, infinite hierarchies… trust me: you are not alone. I will spend some time in a future article to talk about Agile organisations VS traditional organisations.
My advice to you, managers, to make the first step (usually the hardest one) in a cultural/mindset transformation is to accept to delegate your decision power (and I know it is not an easy task, you have worked so hard to be where you are!) but you have to accept a collaborative approach towards change and improvement… Because together, we can go further. There is one ritual which is easy to implement and will undoubtedly help build the mindset of transparency, continuous improvement, user & data-centricity, collaboration, self-organisation… And that is the retrospective meeting.
Reflecting and continuously improving, while educating on the core values and principles of Agile, will slowly move your team towards the other values and principles naturally. And there are very easy methods to apply to animate such meetings like the “stop-start-continue” (what worked and should be continued, what didn’t and should be stopped, and what we should start doing). Just a warning though, if possible, at least at the beginning, have this meeting facilitated by an external agile coach that will prevent you from over-stepping and imposing (we all did it at first), help build trust, set the self-organisation and boundaries.
I hope you liked the article, it was a small discussion I had at lunch with some colleagues and thought I might share… It is just a little bit of culture about Agile and Lean, hoping this will help those embarking in the courageous and extenuating adventure of trying to culturally transform their company. Good luck to you!
Reach out for help if you need to (I did in the past), the community around Agile practices is extremely open and always welcomes newcomers ;-)
