Applying Lean Thinking to Agile Transformation

Often, we need to ask this simple question:

How Lean is your organization agile transformation?

Are we maximizing value and minimizing delays and waste in the agile transformation.

Many times we often hear same problems / patterns repeat.

There will be someone external hire or some frameworks has to be tried due to the unsuccessful agile transformation.

The external hire or another approach or framework comes and tries to change all the efforts previously done, and this can repeat again and again.. is this the right approach?

Realistically, we need to build from the existing efforts and improve from there..

What is the permanent and sustainable path to agility for an organization?

Before we answer the above question ourselves, let us see some of the common problems.

1. Agile Trainings are not effective and efficient enough to make the entire organization understand the 'why' behind agile.
2. The fundamental shift is not happening and it is going back or sliding back to where it was or worse it is affecting the overall flow.
3. There has been a consistent resistance from leadership and management to adopt and support the new agile roles compared to the existing project or product roles.
4. The overall organization structure has not changed a bit in terms of the agile adoption.
5. Agile is seen as a mere process change for the Team level members and not as an environment of change for 'change'.
6. Agile metrics, retrospectives, maturity does not reflect the reality or does not make the transformation move forward.
7. The responsibility of agile transformation is on the shoulders of external coaches and named as catalyst for change.
8. Too many change jargons and methods conflict with each other on a regular basis.
9. Plan-driven approach has not been shifted to adaptive planning and feedback and data-driven models of execution.
10. Sometimes large organization has multi-vendor model has their own definitions which the organization vendors has to go through multiple times, as a different metaphor for change.
11. Senior management does not believe in agile approaches yet, and this is because still we get the business results in a waterfall-agile mixture or waterfall driven agile processes.
12. Identifying and managing the actual change internally and adding innovation, continuous improvement through transformation backlog not seen yet in many of these transformations.

So if these above points reflect the ground reality, then we will see how to overcome by lean thinking applied on the organization transformation and build the transformation in an incremental way.

Let us apply some of the Lean thinking in the organization culture:

1. Problem-solving culture: The entire organization is responsible for any problem in the delivery, it is starting at the top of the organization with leaders that they take the problems and prioritize to solve them.
2. Everyone involved culture: It is an organization level commitment for growth and not to distract with office politics and performance reviews of individuals in an non-performing environment.
3. Leaders develop immediate L1 and L2 leadership and based on their performance only, their performance is evaluated.
4. Managers and Management is evaluated on the overall flow performance, how much value delivered, delivery speed, continuous improvement by minimizing delays and waste. Value stream metrics are for Management.
5. Teams are evaluated on Business value delivered Week on Week, Month on Month and Quarter on Quarter with Innovation and Improvement.
6. Team Leadership has to develop team members and their main role is to became great teachers and guide for the members of the organization. Technical people remain in their craftmanship roles, and avoid getting into managerial or people or process roles to maintain the overall organization technical standards and delivery.

Engage with Leaders to create a safe environment for change and each leader has direct responsibility in creating leadership in the organization, as they are needed to make the change really impactful and meaningful.

Tools alone cannot drive agile, we need to have purpose and good communication happening on the organization scale and capture the efforts of transformation. Please see here, how an organization can achieve all the above https://www.jivapms.com