Lean-Agile in Projects – oil in water?

In the last couple of days, I had some long phone conversations with a few of my old buddies. I had not spoken to them in several months. The lock-down being imposed in the country was helping to connect with many through voice calls rather than just messages on social media. One of them works for a large engineering services organization whereas two others in R&D organizations. One thing that struck me was everybody was referring to one project or the other they were working on (in their workplace of course).

You might ask "so what is the issue?" Within IT and R&D, we are used to being “assigned” to projects and then moving on to another, once it is finished. A resume of an engineer is typically filled  with major projects completed and contributions made. Strong project management practices have evolved to pay attention to individual tasks and resources (engineers and other materials) and manage risks to achieve project completion and thereby its objectives. My point is that by definition Projects are temporary in nature. Resources (both people and material) get deployed to projects and are funded hopefully till completion. Projects see formal closure.

As part of Lean-Agile transformation, one of the foundation principles we convey is Long-term Stable Teams. A department and in turn a larger organization should ideally be an aggregation of carefully designed teams each with a manageable size of members having requisite skills. All work gets deployed to the teams and is accomplished collectively by the members as “one team” to deliver customer value. Long-term stable teams will  allow for members to be invested in their team identity, evolve team norms and practices and become high performing over a period of time. The very belief that the teams are long-term, will enable the next foundation element of Lean-Agile thinking, which is Continuous Improvement. A systematic understanding of the current state of performance indicators, standards and practices to ensure stability, any improvements carefully thought through and implemented so that performance remains stable till the next improvement. It is difficult to imagine how this can happen in a temporary project setup.

So I wonder how Lean-Agile transformation can be made relevant in a Projects based organization?