Is Agile the new Lean?

Companies nowadays are no longer focusing on standardizing and ensuring quality. Quality is no longer value-added, is required. Lean and six sigma implementations are falling short, not because of quality issues, but because employees are not engaged enough to change. Unhappy employees equal unhappy customers. Now what, is agile the new lean?

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, it is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats”.

Charles Darwin

The age of agile

Lean and six sigma process improvement approaches started in the auto industry and manufacturing in the ‘50s, and were successfully applied to other industries. Nevertheless, the software industry that grew significantly during the ‘90s realized that these quality practices were not fast enough. They needed to iterate faster to innovate faster. Being the customer favorite became a survival need, and they couldn’t do it without the ideas of their employees. Millennials in their workplace started asking for different ways of working. That’s how a group of IT experts developed the Agile Thinking Manifesto in 2001. They applied lean principles and tools to reduce waste and combined them with other idea generation tools and team enablers to bring innovation to the workplace more easily.

What is the difference between lean and agile

While lean provides a set of methods like 5S, kanban, just in time, agile is a cultural mindset, a way of thinking about how an organization should work. As Stephen says in his book The Era of Agile “in any particular organization, the practices that emerge will be the result of an interaction between the agile mindset and the specific organizational context”, which may include lean practices. So it is not “either agile or lean”, you can be both. For example, when I implement 5S, I always include in the training an introduction to an agile “we culture” mindset, so that team members can understand the true purpose behind the implementation.

Agile companies

Agile innovative methods have revolutionized the IT industry and enable it to grow faster than ever. Over the past 20 years, they have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams.

Processes make you more efficient, but innovation comes from people, calling each other at 10.30 at night with new ideas

Steve Jobs

Apple was one of the first companies to achieve innovation through iterative customer involvement. Working with manufacturers and being attuned to the customer. Apple integrated customer experience into product design and development.

Now the agile thinking is moving from the software industry to the rest of the industries and all sectors in the organization.

Some companies are born agile like Spotify and Apple, with agile rules that enable them to bring innovation in any sector at any time. Others are made agile, like Zappo’s, Amazon, Airbnb, GE, Saab, P&G even banks like Barclays and Citibank are applying agile methods. Some more conservative and traditional like ExxonMobil are starting in the IT sector. As Stephen Denning says in The Era of agile, “Even big, old firms can undertake an agile transformation if they set their minds to it, and stick with it”.

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Common practices of agile teams

Agile practices help organizations to solve complex problems by disaggregating them into smaller pieces. So instead of having 50 people from different departments involved in a product launch, the product launch is handled by a small team that includes an engineer, a salesman, an account, a designer, a marketer and an HR specialist. The team can handle almost all the decisions, making it easier, faster and more enjoyable to handle. Below are some of the common practices:

1. Work in small batches: work, even big complex projects, is broken down into short-cycle tasks, usually one to three weeks,
2. Small cross-functional teams: Teams are formed by no more than 12 people including a lead (if there is any at all) with different knowledge and background. The magic number is usually six. Jeff Bezos uses the “two-pizza team” philosophy, meaning the than should be small enough to be adequately fed by two pizzas, that is six to ten.
3. Autonomous teams: Each team members is an expert on a subject and decides how to get work done. Some teams even do their own budget, hiring, firing, learning. Some companies like Buurtzoorg a nursing organization with 7000 employees in Netherlands, have no HR department (Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, 2014).
4. Leaders as facilitators: Innovation happens from the top-down and bottom-up. As everyone has the authority to make changes to the company and make decisions in their work, leaders don’t exist, or just coordinate work, but don’t have a higher hierarchy to make decisions or even fire employees.
5. Getting to “done”: at the end of each cycle, work has to be finished completely. The idea is to eliminate multitasking and focus on one task at a time, in order to reduce work in progress.
6. Work without interruption: work is evaluated once the cycle is finished, not before, unless the team member asks for help.
7. Daily standups: meetings are shorter, more organized and frequent. The purpose of the meeting is to show what has been done, what is next and what is in the way.
8. Radical transparency: show progress on visual boards, the more information is shared the better.
9. Customer feedback: the idea is to “show early, show often” as Ed Catmull with Pixar says. It is better to check with the customer frequently to ensure issues are solved ASAP. Everybody is working to serve and listen to the customer. Leaders are no longer bosses, customers are. Tools like Design Thinking help to innovate by better understanding the customer needs and pushing them from the very first steps of the design.
10. Retrospective views: meet at the end of each cycle to provide a basis for planning the next cycle of work

Read more: The power of self-discipline

What is next

Now the key for companies is to be the customer favorite while becoming the employee’s favorite place to work. Engaging employees to make them work as a team enables innovation, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and reduces wasted time. The challenge is how to change day-to-day behaviors to build an agile We Culture company-wide.

Lu Paulise

luciana@biztorming.com

@lupaulise

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