Thursday, February 9, 2017

Day 1, 1:30-2:20: Can Lean help spread Agile across a business?


Expanding Agility to Marketing, Sales, Support, Customers, Executives, Coaches, HR, Legal, and Finance


David Whitlock, Agile Coach at Tripwire, Inc. (@agilevalentine)



What are you looking to learn today?

  • What makes Agile incompatible with non-software?

  • Sucess stories working across business

  • Can we make contracts more Agile?

  • How does Lean "value chain" and other terms translate to Agile?

  • Agile, Lean, and UX

  • Obtaining buy in across organization


The 5 Lean principles

  1. Specify value from the customer's point of view

  2. Map all steps in the Value Stream and identify steps that don't add value

  3. Shorter steps so that value is added quickly ("flow")

  4. Enable customers to pull value when it's ready

  5. Seek perfection by identify and eliminating waste


How do you get buy-in across the organization?

  • Understandable communication plan

  • "Sneak in" Agile retrospectives and other practices

  • Extend an invitation to try it

  • Start at the top: Execs manage their work using Agile techniques

    • Compatible with top-down adoption

    • Liked being self-organizing themselves

    • Daily standups


What else is out there besides Agile?

  • Theory of Constraints/Lean

    • Small batches, financial view, vocabulary for business

    • Teams and Management, not Teams vs. Management

    • Reduce waste

    • Disrupt an industry via innovation

    • Get products to customers faster

    • Value Stream Mapping

      • Is it like story mapping?  (Not really)

    • Pull system

    • Public, real-time visibility (e.g., daily standup)

      • Status, progress

      • Value Stream: How is it measured?

      • Feature/epic status/state


SAFe and Lean

  • Both use term "Value Stream", but in slightly different ways

  • SAFe 4.0 is introducing [support for delivering] hardware/firmware

  • People closest to the work make decisions

  • Quarterly PI Planning

    • Helped streamline decisions and identify/resolve dependencies

    • Use an Andon cord to ask dor help

  • Transparency of the Portfolio of Value Streams

  • Break down functional silos.  Organize around the Value Stream.

  • Mean time to value


Lean and software

  • Is [software] work really that repetitive?

    • You can still establish leading practices

    • Compare with construction industry

      • What generates value?  When do materials need to arrive?

      • Very much a one-off world, no two buildings are the same

  • How do we deal with complexity?

    • When root causes are different


What about projects that have an ending point?

  • Marketing, Legal, creative work

  • Work cross-functionally

  • Leverage tools like retrospectives

  • Keep the conversation going


--
David Whitlock
Adjunct Lecturer
Portland State University

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