Unleash Your Innovation Power: Combining Design Thinking, Agile and Lean (Part 2/4)

Why Design Thinking and Agile Go Together

I’ve recently read a fantastic book – The Lean Startup by Silicon-Valley entrepreneur Eric Ries. If you haven’t read it yet, I can only encourage you to do so. There was one quote in particular that stuck with me:

“Building something nobody wants is the ultimate form of waste.” – Eric Ries

I could not phrase it any better, this is absolutely true. Today, many software corporations build lots of applications that nobody needs at the end of the day. That’s precisely where “lean” comes into play.

At SAP, we started with lean in 2008. To a large extent, this was due to a great challenge we were facing. Back then, it took us about 18 months to develop a product and get it on the market. Too long? Yes, indeed. In the consumer world, it takes a couple of weeks. In the Cloud, you can finalize a product within only one day. Another issue we struggled with was that our developers only invested 25% of their time – yes, you’ve read it correctly, it’s sadly not a typo – in value-adding tasks. The rest was used for meetings, alignments, and other non-value adding functions. That’s why we went for lean.

The Power of Lean

Starting with lean, we introduced several elements with it. Every single one of them is tremendously important for lean approaches to function efficiently – from employee empowerment, over having quality, cost, and development in one hand, to continuous improvement and learning. It’s amazing how much we experienced and learned by applying these principles.

Come Together

Let me elaborate on a few of these key learnings. Co-locating cross-functional teams turned out to be a true asset – and I’ve done a little experiment to verify this. I called up two teams and assigned them to the same task. The first one worked in a set-up very familiar to us: Colleagues in different locations, working together via meetings and calls. I told the other group to come together for one week instead and to work jointly on the same topic in one room. The result was stunning. The second team developed something truly amazing! And you know what? The solution they came up with was designed, developed, and transferred to the customer within due time. On the other hand, the first team turned out to require much more time. Hence, if you have the chance to get people together in one room, focusing all their energy on one topic: Go ahead and do so! The outcome will be sublime.

Uncover Customer Value

One thing I’m really proud of is that already more than 15 (!) years ago, we designed 4,000 screens and tested them globally with more than 6,000 of our customers' users! We applied a human-centered approach for a new SAP solution. Before we started coding, we designed the customer experience first. The key learning for me? A picture is worth a thousand words. Be it a developer, manager, product manager, customer, end user, or designer: They all understand the designed screens instinctively better than hundreds of specification pages could ever explain! That’s what I call an outstanding achievement.

Understand the Value of People and Environment 

I’m sure you’re familiar with the Iceberg Model. Originally, Edward T. Hall developed it as an analogy to culture, but it can be used in corporate contexts just as nicely. Processes, methods, and tools cover the surface. Yet, focusing on processes alone is not enough. What about people? What about their behaviors and environment? That’s all hidden below the surface and it’s extremely valuable – about 80% of the opportunity is in fact stored in an organization’s culture.

If you want to transform an organization and become truly innovative, process-centered perspectives alone will not lead you there. And I’m convinced that this cultural change begins with a new way of leadership: We need to humanize it. 

The Power of Agile and Lean

In 2012, SAP continued its journey with Design Thinking by combining lean with agile. Lots of SAP customers strive for agile methods. For a good reason. With agile, companies can optimize development processes, become more productive, and get things done more quickly. This is great but clearly masks a huge problem: if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out of the process. That’s why we need Design Thinking to complement agile. From the beginning, Design Thinking and agile need to be combined to involve end users in an iterative way and get a product implemented and into the hands of customers. That’s all that matters. 

At this year’s SAP NOW Berlin, Jürgen Müller, SAP Chief Technology Officer and board member, phrased this very nicely in a formula:

Innovation = Creativity x Execution

I completely agree. Both components alone cannot deliver the same value as their combination. Creativity and execution belong together to foster innovation. The same holds for agile and lean.

Learning #2 of #4: Combine Design Thinking and Agile 

Check out the other articles:

• Learning #1: Involve customers from the beginning!
• Learning #3: Foster a culture of innovation

Interested in watching the entire story on Design Thinking: Agile and Lean? Check out my video:

Copyediting by Kathrin Rüeck

Sources:

• Hall, E.T. (1976). Beyond culture. Garden City, N.Y: Anchor Press.
• Ries, E. (2014). Lean Startup: Schnell, risikolos und erfolgreich Unternehmen gründen. Redline Verlag.