The Lean Gelateria | Part 7 | Dan, Mango and Kanban

<<<<<<<<< Lean Gelateria | Part 6

This is the continuation of my previous post – ‘Daniel Brown and Mango’. I suggest that you read it to understand the first part of Dan’s story.

Do you remember?  The first 2 hours of demo after the fourth iteration resulted in a list of 50 items – defects, minor changes, new features, etc.  That was the first demo with Alicia and three customer support managers!  In a way, it is good that Dan proposed a one-week acceptance testing after feature completion.  However, after a week of acceptance testing Dan’s list had more than 275 items!  Alicia was not happy!  Tom, Dan’s boss, was shocked!   All this resulted in an escalation!

Dan’s team was distressed.

Dan’s first priority was to resolve all issues in this project and deliver the application.  The first thing he wanted to do was to have an open discussion with Alicia.

Coincidentally, Alicia initiated a 1-1 meeting with Dan!  She wanted to understand all options in front of them to arrive at a win-win solution.   They decided to meet in the neighborhood gelateria.    They chose the flavor of the day – ‘Mint and Choco Chips’ gelato.

This meeting helped them share their views and settle down on what to do next.  They wanted to put together a joint response and formed a governance team of 3 - Alicia, Dan and Tom.

Joint Response: Tom, Dan, and Alicia had their first joint response meeting to discuss the situation. The question in front of them was about prioritizing and closing all items in a timely manner in such a way that they:

1. Address high priority items first and move on
2. Optimize by grouping related items
3. Test adequately to avoid failure
4. Understand daily progress and make course correction
5. Maximize the number of items closed per week through weekly analysis

Visualizing the Workflow - In his discussion with Tom, Dan stressed on the need to create a visualized workflow using a white board in a common room or work area. Dan shared his experience on how this approach is more effective than emails and outdated tools. Tom agreed.

The next day, Dan came in early, took a hard copy of prioritized work items, and created a visual board in the meeting room. His team members helped him with their ideas. They created about 20 to 30 rows on the board and divided each row into multiple columns. Each column corresponded to the standard work flow – analyze, code, test, verify, build, user acceptance, done. Each row represented a work item with a work item identification number, short description, and other such attributes.

The Pull Factor: From that day Dan and his team would begin their work day with a crisp meeting in front of the white board. They also ended their work days by reviewing the items on the white board and discussing ways to improve throughput and quality in future. During the first few days, Dan was orchestrating the team on task assignment. Gradually his team started not only pulling work items, but also logically grouping work items in order to optimize the time spent in coding and testing.

Limiting Work in Progress: Based on his experience, Dan believed that mindless context-switching is a waste of time. This happens as a result of keeping many items open, switching back and forth, and losing focus. He coached his team to complete as many tasks on hand as possible before moving on to the next work item. He also shared with them the ill effects of keeping several work-in-progress items. His team members grasped the truth behind his suggestions.

Collaborative Learning: During these tough weeks, every daily meeting or weekly retrospective was a learning experience. Team members shared debugging techniques, domain-specific issues, etc. with the rest of the team to enrich their knowledge and prevent similar issues. Even during the first week they found ways to minimize the number of defects by discussing and implementing simple techniques to improve quality in each step of the workflow.

The Outcome: Eventually, Dan’s team became faster and smarter. Dan could see an increasing trend in the completion of work items. Seeing these positive signs, Alicia regained her trust. Within four weeks, the list of pending items had shrunk to 20.

By the end of the fifth week, they only had ten low priority issues on hand. With a schedule overrun of about 6 weeks, Alicia certified the application for user training and implementation.

Reflection and Recognition: A week after the initiation of user training, Tom and Alicia sponsored a dinner for Dan and his team. On the dinner day, Dan convened a 30-minute retrospective with his team. Alicia, Dan, and his team discussed several aspects of the project including what went well, lessons learned, and areas of improvement. Everyone agreed that as soon as they came across innumerable changes and new work items they worked together to find a new approach and it helped them take charge of the situation. The key factors that enabled them deliver results were:

1. Visualizing Workflow
2. Limiting Work-in-Progress and Minimizing Context-Switching
3. Measuring and Managing Flow
4. Nurturing an Open Environment and Making Processes and Policies Explicit
5. Identifying Improvement Opportunities

Both Alicia and Dan agreed that they needed to consider demos to end users and retrospectives at the end of iterations in their projects in order to minimize the spurt of changes and ideas at project completion.

Kanban Know-how: Years after this incident Dan reads an article titled ‘Introduction to Kanban” and later attends a Kanban workshop. He is able to relate these to his project experience – he identifies many similarities and some improvement ideas. He feels proud of himself and his team and shares his thoughts with his team mates. He feels proud because he can connect with the essence of Kanban in his approach. He feels proud because his experience and knowledge make him realize the power of Kanban!

With hindsight, he feels that he could have used yellow stickers or a tool to improve effectiveness and optimized the time spent managing the visual board. He could have hired a Kanban coach to help his team in areas such as value stream mapping. However, he realizes that the popularity of Kanban in the software industry has grown only in recent years.

Six months after these happenings and with a promotion at work, Dan continues to execute projects using Agile, Lean and Kanban.

What has been your experience related to implementing Kanban?

Lean Gelateria | Part 8 >>>>>>>>>>

The Lean Gelateria | Part 6 | Daniel Brown and Mango

<<<<<<<<<< Lean Gelateria | Part 5

This blog post is Dan’s story. Dan is a medium built and upbeat UK born software engineer. He wanted to work with hi-tech teams in software engineering and immigrated to United States during early 90s. Traveling to places was his hobby. He spent his weekends and vacation in travel. Dan visited India in May’94 and spent a month. He visited all prominent states, cities and country side.  That is when he tasted Indian mangoes of different types – Alphonso, Kesar, Dussheri, Neelam, Rumani, Banganpalli, Rajapuri, Totapuri and so on. Like most travelers, he took pleasure in eating Indian mangoes.

Back in the United States, he found a neighborhood shop that served mango ice cream. He loved it.  Couple of years later, they started offering mango gelato! These days, Dan continues to frequent that shop to have a scoop of mango gelato!

Some of his close friends started calling him Dango (Daniel Mango) because of obvious reasons!

Dan’s Delight: On Monday after the Labor Day weekend of 2002, Dan was on top of the world because Tom, his boss, assigned him one of the most technically challenging projects in the company. Tom was the IT director of a large manufacturing company that supplied electronic utilities to households through retail outlets. Dan was one of his direct reports who played the role of project manager in IT projects.

This project, named DA (disconnected access), was about enabling their technical support team through a state-of-the-art application to support disconnected access to their central databases. Using this application, their support team could reach end users living in remote areas, provide them with necessary support, collect payment, and print invoices even if there was no connectivity to central servers. The goal was to improve customer satisfaction and this was one of the strategic projects of the year under the CEO’s radar.

Customer Confidence: Dan and his team of four engineers studied the high level requirements, analyzed the pros and cons of three different architectures, and selected the most optimal one. Considering the business demand and the estimates, they agreed to deliver the application in three months. Alicia was the point-of-contact in the business and she had worked with Dan on a different project a year ago. She had more than fifteen years of experience in her domain. In project DA, she worked closely with Dan and his team in creating and reviewing the user interface design during the initial weeks. She was happy with the suggestions and ideas from Dan and his team and was confident that the team would deliver results.

Iterative Approach: Dan believed in an iterative approach and decided with his team to execute this project in five iterations of two weeks each. As the application incrementally evolved over these five iterations, and the schedule was aggressive, Dan could not demonstrate the finished product to Alicia before the end of the fourth iteration. Alicia had also invited three customer support managers from different regions to attend the demo.

Delayed Demo: No wonder, in each step of the demo, Alicia and the customer support managers started discussing new options and asking Dan whether the user interaction can be improved further.  They suggested new ideas which turned into changes to the user interface or validation aspects. After a two-hour demo, Dan and his team came out with a list of 50 items, some of which were new features, some others were changes, and the rest were cosmetic changes and defects.

The Aftermath: Dan had a suggestion – that Alicia and her three managers plan a one-week acceptance testing after feature completion in order to explore all the features and provide him with their feedback. Alicia agreed. After a week of acceptance testing Dan’s list had more than 275 items. Alicia was not happy with the results and Tom, Dan’s boss, was shocked. Dan’s team was distressed that, in spite of their sincere efforts, they had to manage this escalation.

Dan had to forgo his visits to his favorite places including the neighborhood gelateria. He wanted to resolve all issues in this project and deliver the application.

What did he do is coming in the next part of this series.

Lean Gelateria | Part 7 >>>>>>>>

The Lean Gelateria | Part 5 | Resolutions and Principles

<<<<<<<<<<<< Lean Gelateria | Part 4

New Year and Resolutions

Welcoming a new year with grand celebrations and a list of resolutions is not uncommon.  Many of us go to places, rock with loud music, scream to welcome the first of January, travel around the city and go home at wee hours.  Some of us do it differently – we stay home with families and welcome the new year. Some of us decide on a set of resolutions and strive to stay focused. Some of us choose not to have any resolutions. All of us are not the same. That’s how we are.

Sometimes, some of us who focus on resolutions don’t succeed. When it happens, we make sure that our resolutions get carried forward to the next year.

Sometime in 2012, Time magazine listed the top 10 most commonly broken New Year resolutions. One of those resolutions is ‘Eat Healthier and Diet’.  A familiar one.  In this busy and modernized world, it is very challenging to eat healthier and diet. Isn't it?

What can we do?  Eat whole fruits.  Stay away from ice-cream and have some gelato – I mean authentic gelato. Next time, when you get a chance, try strawberry gelato.

Keeping your resolutions alive

How can you keep your resolutions alive? How can you make sure that you stick to your list of resolutions?  When your resolutions are based on strong principles, it is highly probable that your resolutions stay in your mind all the time.   You keep remembering them.  However, you may get distracted due to something or the other, deviate, violate and break some of your resolutions.  How do you avoid such deviations or violations?  If you believe in what you want to do, have a strong purpose that supports your resolution, and ensure focus, you will see encouraging results.

Is learning in your list?

Did you plan to learn something new in 2018?  Is that one of your resolutions?  How do you make room for learning?  Have you already started?  Are you trying alternate approaches?  Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Learning about Lean Thinking, Agile and Lean Software Development is going to help you perform your day-to-day activities optimally. That could lead to optimizing your efforts and learning further. Learning something new is a wonderful experience.

Principles that keep us lean

Agile and Lean are based on value-driven philosophy.  When you analyze the way you do things (also known as process) with Lean Thinking, you put them under three categories - 1) processes that add value to customer, 2) processes that add value to business and 3) processes that do not add any value.   This is because Lean is based on the following seven principles.

1. Eliminate waste -   Eliminate waste by avoiding or removing activities that do not add value to business, or contribute to customer value add or improve product quality.
2. Amplify learning – Learn as a group. Share knowledge among team members. Ensure knowledge retention and reuse.
3. Delay commitment - Avoid premature decisions and commitments.   Encourage decision making when there are adequate facts and fewer assumptions.
4. Delivery quickly – Delivery early and frequently so that you get feedback to incorporate in the next cycle or iteration.
5. Empower the team - Respect people. Encourage team members to solve problems and identify best solutions.   Provide suggestions and motivate the teams.
6. Build quality in - Build integrity and quality into the product from initial stages.  Do not attempt to initiate steps to build quality into product when the product is ready for integration testing.
7. Optimize the whole – Optimizing only one or two parts of the system does not improve the system.  Any improvement initiative needs to consider the entire system as a whole. 

Let me ask you

Can you give examples of wastes in software projects?  How can we categorize waste in software engineering?

Lean Gelateria | Part 6 >>>>>>

The Lean Gelateria | Part 4 | Imitations Galore!

<<<<<<<<<<<< Lean Gelateria | Part 3

Do you know?

There are tens of thousands of gelato shops around the world. However, it is very rare to find a shop that matches the authenticity and delicacy of Italian Gelato!  Everyone knows the recipe, the procedure or the method.  Less than 0.1% of them deliver authentic gelato.  Why so?

The answer

In 2011, Larry Olmstead, wrote an article ‘The Best Gelato in America’, in Forbes Magazine.  In this article, he says,

"I had never had standout gelato on our shores (i.e. United States). I’ve had okay gelato, …… but not great gelato. The biggest problems are either “mass market” style gelatos made from bagged mixes, which you will find in resort areas and malls, and hipster-style gelato, which seeks to improve on the original before mastering the original, with flavors like star anise when they can’t perfect pistachio."

And he adds, "When it comes to gelato, I usually go for a fruit or nut version, which I rarely do in ice cream, because the nature of gelato amplifies the taste of the ingredients. The benchmark gelato is pistachio, because every shop in Italy has it and Italy grows some of the world’s best pistachios.   The easiest way to assess gelato is simply by looking at it. Good gelato has muted natural colors, nothing bright. Pistachios are not actually electric green, and neither are kiwis, while cantaloupes are light orange, not bright orange."

Weak pillars don’t support

In Part-2 of this blog series, I mentioned that not only MIT researchers but also thousands of senior leaders from several corporates visited Toyota’s production lines in Japan.  They studied the practices and returned home to implement them.  Most of them implemented all such practices but failed to demonstrate results!   Meanwhile, Toyota replicated its practices in United States and started manufacturing cars there! It worked seamlessly.

“The pillars of Lean Thinking are not tools and waste reduction”, says Craig Larman.     

Toyota president Gary Convis says, “The two pillars that support The Toyota Way (also known as Lean Thinking) are, Respect for People and Continuous Improvement”.

When you have respect for people, you harness the intellect of employees, you establish a meaningful relationship with customers, you do not allocate wasteful work to teams, and finally you develop teams and grow customers.

Harnessing the intellect

In 2006, Gary Hamel wrote a paper “Management Innovation” in Harvard Business Review.  In this paper he wrote, “Only after American carmakers had exhausted every other explanation for Toyota’s success – an undervalued yen, a docile workforce, Japanese culture, and superior automation – were they finally able to admit that Toyota’s real advantage was its ability to harness the intellect of ‘ordinary’ employees.”

In Agile 2006, Tom Poppendieck said, “Today, GM and Ford have adopted most of the [Lean] practices. They understand about eliminating waste. But, they neglected the other pillar of Lean. The other foundational pillar of Lean is ‘Respect People’. That is the huge difference. When you respect people, you don’t waste their work. You don’t ask them to do useless things. You train them. You treasure their input. You enable them to do the very best job they can. And, you give them pride in their work. Pride is the most important compensation you can give anybody – not money.”

Makes lot of sense! Right?

  

Let me ask you

What do these two pillars of lean mean to you?   What practices relate to these two pillars?

Lean Gelateria | Part 5>>>>>>>>>>>

The Lean Gelateria | Part 3 | The Foundation of Lean

<<<<<<<<<< The Lean Gelateria | Part 2 

The Gelato Culture

Do you know?  Carpigiani Gelato University is dedicated to the development of the gelato culture throughout the world.  According to the faculty here, Gelato is a natural food with important nutritional value. In fact, the ingredients of gelato are the same as those you probably use almost every day: milk, eggs, cream, cocoa, fruit and basic building blocks like proteins, sugar, fat, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. It is interesting to highlight that gelato does have important nutritional value. It's nice to know that there is a food out there that is so delicious and yet good for you!

How about Vanilla?

I am sure you have tried vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. This is not what I am talking about.  Have you ever tried vanilla gelato? Sometimes, it is prepared with a fresh twist of lemon!  Try! It is simple and delicious!   Yes, simply delicious!

The Foundation – Eh? Secret Anagram!

Is it true that Kanban boards, lean tools and waste reduction are the foundation blocks of lean?  The answer, as you may guess is ‘no’. 

If the answer is no, what is the foundation of lean or lean thinking?   “The foundation of lean is not tools or waste reduction”, says Craig Larman and he adds, “The more one learns about lean, the more one appreciates that the foundation is manager-teachers who live and teach it and have long hands-on experience.”

Let me explain.  In Toyota, most new employees underwent several months of learning to understand and internalize the foundations of lean thinking.  They learned how to identify waste.

Managers practiced ‘Go See’, which means going to their teams and seeing how things happen with their own eyes rather than believing or learning the truth from reports or dashboards!   The Japanese term for this simple practice is ‘genchi genbutsu’.    It means ‘Go See’ or solve problems at the source by observing and verifying data.   When you do this you will have more than superficial understanding of project status.

Toyota managers appreciated the importance of ‘gemba’ - the real place or the place where value is created.  It is the front-line where hands-on value workers are!

Unless you see what is happening at the workplace or unless you sit with hands-on engineers and understand how they create, maintain and test software you can’t come up with useful kaizen or improvement. This is more than MBWA or ‘Management by Walking Around’. When you do MBWA, you may or may not observe details. You talk to team members and build rapport. You ask some questions, not necessarily powerful questions or deep questions all the time. And you move on. Are you happy with the effect of your MBWA practice? Have you come up with any suggestions or ideas to your team members on continuous improvement?  Learn more about ‘Go See’ or genchi genbutsu and put it into practice!

Once, the president of Toyota said to the management team, “I want you actively to train your team members on how to think for themselves.”    This reflects the culture of the management.   Toyota managers were educated in lean thinking, continuous improvement, root cause analysis, statistics, systems thinking, etc. They were educated about how to coach their teams.  ‘Good Thinking, Good Products!’, is the internal motto here. The culture of mentoring helped in ensuring good thinking.  Managers were hands-on experts in their domain.  Team members learned from their managers.   Managers were not directors; they were teachers of lean thinking. They worked along with their teams. They did not join meetings over phone!

The foundation of lean is manager-teachers who live and teach it and have long hands-on experience. It is not cutting cost or implementing new tools or reducing waste.

Eh? Secret Anagram!

Anagram is a word or phrase or name formed by rearranging the letters of another. For example, the anagram of ‘forty five’ is ‘over fifty’.

What is the foundation of lean? It is the anagram of ‘Eh Secret Anagram’. Find it!

I am sure you got it!    I have put it bold already!

Let me ask you

Have you experienced any of the concepts discussed in this post?

Lean Gelateria | Part 4 >>>>>>>.

The Lean Gelateria | Part 2 | Lean? The Goal?

<<<<< The Lean Gelateria | Part 1

Italy, Sicily and Gelato: 

Do you know?  Gelato was invented in the 16th century in Italy.  The island of Sicily was its birthplace!  The art of gelato making was passed on and perfected in Italy until the 20th century. That is when many Italian families specializing in gelato making traveled to several countries in Europe and introduced gelato across Europe. Italy has more than 35000 shops that sell ice creams and gelatos and continues to retain the authenticity as one would say ‘If you want authentic homemade gelato, you have to visit Italy!’

Who would say ‘No’?

Do you say yes to chocolate? If yes, try chocolate gelato!  This is a wonderful flavor and it comes with the health benefits of both chocolate and gelato.

Leaning on TPS

In my previous post, I wrote little bit about the history of Lean. Lean refers to a manufacturing approach or a set of manufacturing practices developed by Toyota (1950s). It was known as TPS or Toyota Production System. Lean or Lean Thinking is a term introduced by the researchers at MIT.  All it meant was TPS or the Toyota way of meeting customer needs.

TPS is the backbone or root of Toyota’s outstanding performance, customer loyalty and brand value.   GM and Ford reported losses in 2006. Toyota reported a profit of 13 plus billion US dollars! In 2007, the market capitalization of Toyota was higher than the combined market capitalization of the three giants (GM, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler). Toyota remained innovative and introduced hybrid vehicles.

Could visitors lean?

Not only MIT researchers but also thousands of senior leaders from several corporates visited Toyota’s production lines in Japan. They studied the practices and returned home to implement them.  Most of them implemented all such practices but failed to demonstrate results! Meanwhile, Toyota replicated its practices in United States and started manufacturing cars there! For them, Lean worked seamlessly.

So, what is the crux and power of Lean Thinking or Toyota way? In Toyota, for each employee there are ample opportunities to find problems in one’s chain of activities or role, solve them and make improvement.  Toyota employees are nurtured in identifying problems and living with the awareness that they hold an opportunity to solve problems This enables them improve the way they do their day-to-day work! On the other hand the management is committed to investing in its people and promotes the culture of continuous improvement.

The goal

The goal of lean is to deliver value, sustainably delivery value and sustainably deliver value fast. Let me elaborate.The goal of lean or lean thinking or any lean initiative is to deliver value as early as possible in short intervals or short cycles in a timely manner with high quality. You should not try to do this by taking short cuts or making quick fixes thereby lowering the level of quality or perform in unsustainable pace through unsafe practices. You should do this through undeterred focus on continuous improvement.

The scope

Every team (from functions like Service Delivery, Marketing, Sales, Recruitment, Operations, Training, etc.,) in organizations would be second to none in saying that the goal is to sustainably deliver value fast at short intervals! How do we move towards this goal? Software project teams do this by adopting agile methodologies.  Agile methodologies have been founded on some of the lean principles.  Some software teams adopt lean practices such as Kanban. We will discuss more on this in my subsequent posts.

So, what is the difference between lean and agile? One of the major differences is the scope of implementation. Agile methodologies are implemented typically in software projects (after the contract is signed and project is created). Lean can be implemented end-to-end.What I mean here is lean practices can be implemented from pre-sales stage to project or services delivery and further.  Does it sound like ‘From pre-sales, services delivery, customer satisfaction surveys, sustenance, to account mining’? Yes. That’s correct.

Is this your question?

You know the goal and scope of lean thinking. You may ask, "So, is it true that Kanban boards, lean tools and waste reduction are the foundation blocks of lean?"

Brilliant question!   Let us wait and see the answer in my next post!

Let me ask you

Before we part, I have some questions for you. 

Do you have adequate opportunities to identify problem, issues, and challenges that are directly under your influence - in your project or day-to-day work life?  Do you solve them and see improvement?  Or are you too busy identifying and digressing on problems that are not under your sphere of influence?

The Lean Gelateria | Part 3 >>>>>>>>>

The Lean Gelateria | Part 1 | Lean? What is it?

Last night while facebooking I was going through some of the Diwali moments of  my relatives and friends.  Loads of pictures and expressions - with the lamps, rangolis, crackers, colorful dresses, sweets, and so on! Then I remembered my regular 30-minute early morning walks.

I notice something obvious during my morning walks right after festival days. Well, I see some new folks on my way. Probably they start or renew their walking regime right after a festival day. It happens!  For example, Diwali, the festival of lights, offers us a variety of high-calorie sweets that one can’t resist and it seldom lets us succeed in our attempts to remain light. We are heath conscious. Some of us are reactive. And some are diligent.

Aren’t many of us on the same boat? Let me put forward a tingly question in front of you!

“Do't we want to be lean and fit?”

Who would say no?  I believe every one of us wants to be lean!

Welcome you to the lean gelateria!  How about a gelato, instead of the usual ice cream?

Gelato is made from natural ingredients. Gelato contains vitamins, minerals, calcium and protein. So, it is nutritious.   It has lower fat as compared to traditional ice cream.  It is fresh and tasty!  No wonder gelato is liked by everyone from small children to grandparents.

Gelato has started transforming the ice cream culture all over the world including India.  One can spot a gelateria in every shopping mall, multiplexes and prime shopping areas of all major cities in India. Just as bakery is for different types of breads and cakes, gelateria is for several types of gelato, sorbet, etc.   FYI – Sorbet is made of fresh fruit, sugar and water. No milk or cream. I heard that it has 0% fat and of course, it suits those who are lactose intolerant.

I no longer witness the thrill among us on devouring traditional cone ice cream from a roadside shop.   A familiar brand of ice cream after dinner is less than ordinary and one wouldn’t talk about such things with friends and colleagues!

So, this lean gelateria is for all of you!  I am planning to serve you unique flavors every week.

Nowadays everyone is health conscious. People of all ages aspire to be active and fit.

Yes, everyone wants to be agile and lean!  This includes us and our customers. Agile methods and lean practices provide benefits. We know that.

Do we know the difference between agile and lean?

Agile methodology is an umbrella term that refers to a set of methods that are evolutionary, light-weight and empirical in nature.  There are several agile methods such as FDD, XP (Extreme Programming), Scrum, SAFe and DSDM (Dynamic and Systems Development Method) in practice today.  Some of these (for example, FDD and XP) came into light even before agile manifesto and agile principles were scripted and announced to the world.

By 2000, the success of agile methods such as Extreme Programming, and SCRUM inspired the industry.  During February 2001, 17 industry experts convened at ‘The Lodge’ at Snowbird Ski Resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah and defined ‘Agile Manifesto’ and ‘Agile Principles’.   Gradually, the popularity of Agile grew across the globe.  Agile gurus and practitioners organized several conferences, workshops and events to evangelize and propagate agile methodologies.   Lean Software Development and Kanban spiced up this evolution and got adopted as best practices in Agile Methods.

In summary, any agile method is a way of developing and maintaining software and it adheres to agile manifesto and agile principles. The core of agile is about delivering working software to customers from the early days of projects at short intervals or iterations (of every one to four weeks) in a sustainable pace. Agile teams deliver business value by delivering what matters the most to the customer in short iterations.

Exceedingly often, in IT industry we manage projects that need to be executed in a time-bound manner within budget. In such projects, project sponsors and stakeholders find it valuable to get adequate visibility and predictability at regular intervals or iterations. Also, considering working software the true measure of progress and delivering business value to business users at a consistent pace in terms of high priority feature sets has become quintessential. Iterative and incremental development provides an opportunity to practice continuous improvement through the feedback received iteration-end demos and retrospectives. This leads to the fact that methodologies that ensure adequate visibility and predictability are the most sought-after. Agile methods deliver this promise all the time. 

Lean? What is it?

Lean refers to a manufacturing approach or a set of manufacturing practices developed by Toyota (1950s) and evangelized in the US and other parts of the world in 1990s.

The founders of agile manifesto and agile principles were influenced by lean manufacturing.   Lean manufacturing and agile methods follow a similar philosophy.

Lean is not a methodology.  It is a set of practices.  Some of the practices of lean are very unique and may not be found in typical agile projects.  Hence it is worth exploring this subject area.

You may hear “Lean is about reducing waste!”   Let us not settle down with this definition.

I will meet you here next week, with the special flavor of our gelateria!

The Lean Gelateria | Part 2 | >>>>>>>