Hybridizing Agile With Lean: For Government Enterprises
Written By — Utpal Chakraborty

On viewing the customer’s response towards the product they receive has made many experts come up with different approaches toward execution of projects and their management. Thus, they came up with the idea of agile and similarly lean from a similar philosophical point of view. However, they both are quite different from each other and work on different sets of principles, but still can apply together for the betterment and achieving well in manufacturing, automobile, aviation, IT etc. which is difficult otherwise.
On viewing the increment in the above areas and success of large enterprises, our team came up with the proposal of fabricating a framework using these methodology and a mini-scale trial implementation of the framework in a government enterprise. Yes, you read it correctly “Agile & Lean in government”. When we declared this thought of ours, many six-sigma lean practitioners and scholars came up with queries, as for why government. Well, the answer to this question is simple. Ask yourself, which aspect of your life is not linked to the government? Whether it is poor electric supply or low maintenance, raising prices of commodities or the unemployment, the finger is somehow pointed towards the government. Thus, this is the company that needs to adapt a good methodology to improve its performance, as this is going to affect the whole nation.
Some of the other challenges that are expected to be encountered in any Govt. Department while trying to implement any such methodologies are:
1. The venality at different levels that influences the place of the work.
2. The intervention of higher officials makes it puzzling to go with the sole objective.
3. The projects are in focus of media which is the main reason that arises questions.
4. Targeted by many political workers, groups in order to make most out of it.
5. The implementation has to face huge delays as everything need to be consulted with the authorities and wait for their reply.
You must have heard about agile and lean implementation in many different industries, but directing this concept toward the government departments and officials as a framework is something that is completely novel. Six Sigma Lean methodology is something that is already been applied in the some of the government departments at various parts of the world, but hybridizing it with agile is what makes it unique. So you are going to be a spectator of this completely innovative scheme and how it is going to turn out.
This idea is linked with many opportunities to bring an improvement in the current system of government, leading to a far better state with enhancement in every department. However, with this comes great challenges, meaning that this won’t be a piece of cake. One of the hardest thing about this is that the government is not one organization, but a sum of many different organizations working under different rules and regulations. So, there needs to be a different set of principles that are needed to be applied to this. For this reason, we can work on only one department at a time and now we have to choose that one department for our framework as an assignment.
Negotiations led us towards construction (Building, Road, Bridge, Metro, Airport, Stadium), as this was the only sector where already many of the lean principles have been introduced. Adding a little charm of agile into it can give us a healthier strategy, which is exclusive as well. Although this methodology is open to all the fields under the term from railways, aviation, mining, commerce, defense and so on. The idea behind choosing construction was that it was already stacked with different approaches related to agile and lean.
But, the thing whether construction is worth investing in, to know this we have designed a set of questions designed for construction industry experts which can help us evaluate the feasibility of this entire framework. The framework to be declared successful when it meets all the criteria which includes:
· The project is completed within the budget
· It is completed within the given time frame
· Sustainable positive results are attained etc.
To accomplish the goal we decided to apply lean six sigma methodology with some amount of tailoring, as they are helpful in attaining a good progress for different projects. Lean can help in adding worth and increase the outcome of the project while eliminating the waste.
The objective is to eliminate them so that outcome can be enhanced. The one possible way to do so is by using a different approach. By this, you can say that the language that can persuade officials and look into the better side of the coin. Like using the word “cost cutting” for lean and “better outcome” for agile. This is the easiest way how you can reduce a bit of political influence from it.
If you see the previous statistics of the evolution of construction worldwide, then it becomes completely evident that this is the sector which needs immediate attention in terms of improvement in almost all aspects. The worldwide figures from the year 2014–2015 show that there are almost 80% projects that were over budget and 60% were those who ended up with poor quality. This doesn’t end here, as 90% of them did not even meet the deadline. This shows the faults in the construction sector management. In addition few more shocking statistics collected from different reliable sources for all types of constructions are quoted for reference:
· More than 20% waste in any type of construction
· In more than 30% of the construction projects, major to medium severity defects detected within 5 to 10 years of construction
· More than 15% of the construction projects has very serious defects that becomes life threatening within a span of 10 to 15 years
· More than 20% of the constructions life expectancy is 10 to 15 years lesser than it was projected at the time of construction
· In a country like India more than 1500 calamities happen and more than 14000 people dies every year due to accidents occurring from defective constructions
· More than 12 billion dollars of loss every year due to all those
· More than 7% of the constructions gets demolished and rebuild completely every year
To avoid such problems we have accommodated a pre-construction quality and testing section in the framework. The aim is to test every material or instrument before using it so that there is no damaged piece used. Besides this, everything is analyzed and if any problem or hurdle is seen then the task to be started over again at very early stage.
That is why after starting the work, we have to remain flexible towards any editing or modification that needs to be done in each increment on the path of accomplishing the goal. Of course those cannot be entertained at a later stage. For this, there needs to be good collaboration and communication with the team. This can be attained by calling up a postmortem meeting which is similar to a retrospective after moving a little ahead in the work. The goal is to assess things that went well and that need to be amended. There are couple more tailored agile techniques gave us upper hand to tackle very specific scenarios pertaining to construction in our framework. In this way, a better and closer to the perfect project can be achieved that can satisfy all the needs.
As mentioned before, not only construction the same approach and framework can be applied to different government departments. This can help to improve them and come up with things that can fulfill all the needs and betterment of the consumer, in this case citizens. Thus, setting up an ideal government.
