Being Lean in Tech Companies- My top 10 learnings

Whenever we hear Lean management or “Lean” we have some misassumptions in our mind, like it is only for manufacturing companies or it means cost-cutting and layoffs or it kills innovation and agility, and thus we associate the term in a controversial angle. This article is not about debunking all the misassumptions associated with Lean, rather I will focus on my lessons learned over the years working on Lean Management and hope it helps.

• Lean is focused on the Customer- As a customer obsessed leader this is a very important attribute of Lean for me,? its foundational principle is to focus all value added tasks on your customer and mitigate all non-value tasks. Customer focused approach is critical to any high growth technology company, and all processes should be aligned with the customer needs.
• Lean is not limited to manufacturing - Tech companies can follow an appropriate version of lean thinking. My process has always been to collect customer feedback and use it to discover and implement new ways to deliver more value. Although Lean has a waste-reduction element, it prioritizes experimentation over elaborate processes and embodies the “ fail fast” culture.?
• It is a long-term process, not a quick fix - Lean management transforms a company's culture and promotes continuous improvement but it is a long-term process. The end result is to have a self-sufficient problem-solving environment but it takes time, so incremental transformation is key to stay motivated and maintain buy-ins.
• Educating and Building a culture of continuous improvement -It is important to have buy-in from all levels into the ideas and philosophies of Lean to embrace the same. By implementing a shared objective we will transform an organization’s culture to identifying and solving wastes and inefficiencies. A Lean culture encourages everyone to be problem solvers who contributes to the continuous improvement of the company.
• Lean or Six Sigma - Leaders get confused should we do Lean or Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma, originally they are different disciplines but mostly combined in practice. Using Six Sigma alone itself is a waste, just like if we do too much analysis that it outweighs the benefits it delivers. So my suggestion is to customize based on your needs. Lean takes the big picture of the organization into account and overviews its processes from end-to-end, so start with Lean as the foundation and use Six Sigma for specific improvements. Do not start with Six Sigma only it ignores the big picture, have seen this being done in many places and ultimately unable to reap the benefits of Lean.
• Agile vs Lean: Agile and Lean both prioritizes value and fast delivery. Use Lean to identify bottlenecks at different stages of development by tracking software delivery performance metrics like MTTR or LTFC or throughputs and eliminating them by getting rid of tasks that do not add value. Agile promotes cross collaboration which increases customer satisfaction. Hence picking which methodology is better for your software development will not be easy, evaluate both principles and what suits your business best then incorporate them into your software development process. You can evaluate Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe?) as well, it brings in values of both Agile and Lean and being successfully used in many large organizations.
• Lean’s worth in software development- I get this question quite often, is it worth devoting time, money and effort on the Lean implementation? My answer to them is if you are struggling with delivering value in a timely manner then it's worth it, if you want to develop products faster and increase their quality, then it is worth it. Also worth it when you want to save money and maximize the efficiency of your development team.
• Lack of an implementation strategy - Implementing Lean at an organization isn’t as easy as explaining the benefits to the leadership, before starting out leaders need to establish an actionable vision and goals that the entire organization understands. Lean development strategy should include realistic assessment of the culture of the organization, and whether it can handle a lean transformation or not. Try to foresee issues and blockers that might arise and preparing an action plan in advance is necessary.
• Having the right metrics to measure the success: If you are in charge of lean transition then make sure you introduce specific metrics to track the results of the lean transformation from the start. This means having the right metrics in place to evaluate how effective and efficient lean has been in the organization, both culturally and operationally. Some common metrics I recommend are -lead time, cycle time, WIP, iteration velocity, NPS, CSAT, Knowledge/Experiment Ratio, etc.
• Outsource non-value added activities -This is more applicable for start-up mode companies but can be applicable to any company as well, realizing how important it is to focus on your customer value added activities, your core competencies and make the call sooner on outsourcing non-value added activities.

I started my career in the manufacturing sector as a technology consultant and executed multiple operation excellence projects in top global companies, so when I moved out of that sector my aim was to introduce my learnings to improve the technology development process and focus on delivering more value to customers across different sectors. Whether you are building a new product from scratch or iterating one, if companies are willing to change their processes and see experimentation as a good thing, then Lean methodology can be an option.?