Lean project management vs Agile isn’t the question you should be asking. It is if lean vs scrum or XP. This is because in my opinion lean empathizes what Agile set out to do. It is product management at its core. There is no bigger waste than building features that a user won’t use. Lean is focused on addressing this. 1. Outcomes vs OutputsAs a business owner or product manager you want to always be delivering value to the customer. You don’t care about software engineering practices. Its outcomes you want not outputs. The IT department plays a critical role in the success of your business. You will be investing a lot of money for them to help you deliver strategic plans and revenue for the company. It should be deeply integrated with business functions. How to do this is by having product teams. When you should use lean is you want to have your development team part of the mission to service your customers. You need to provide them with your problems not requirements. The last thing you want is to spoon feeding the development team requirements as this just leads to poor results. You want the team to be focused on delivering outcomes. Lean focuses on delivers outcomes When you should use other Agile methodologies such as Scrum Agile Framework work is when you are outsourcing your software development. You need to realize though what you are doing is staggered waterfall not Agile per se. Scrum gets lost in following the framework vs delivering value. If you want your IT department to be a cost center and think its okay you should read LeanEssays: The Cost Center Trap. Scrum focuses on delivering outputs 2. Lean Project Management & Agile Have Same PrinciplesLean is actually the most Agile of all methodologies if you look at the principles. I have attempted to map lean principles to agile principles below. There is a comprehensive overlap. Why I favor lean over other Agile methodologies is the acceptance that there is waste in Agile methodologies and we should look at reducing it. Lean focuses on delivering value to customers faster by identifying and removing waste from a manufacturing process, or (put another way) by reducing lead times through optimization of the value stream. Lean primarily focus is reducing waste. Scrum focuses on user centered product. There are 7 types of waste in lean product development. Maybe you don’t need a estimation session every week so you have a backlog of story points for the next 18 months. This is why I feel other Agile methodologies hide behind the framework which can quickly turn into a staggered waterfall approach vs agile project management.
DevOps is mainly geared towards the first 3 principles of Agile:.
3. Lean Product Development vs ScrumLean project management was first crafted by Mary and Tom Poppendieck by taking lean manufacturing techniques and using them for software. The wrote the book “Lean Software Development”, which utilized Lean values, practices, and principles to the software industry. Scrum is the Agile methodology of choice used by large enterprises. They are utilizing Scrum as a hybrid project management as staged project management vs staying true to Agile principles. Methodologies such as SAFE and LeSS are a high contributing factor to this. The core idea of Scrum was to release small increments of value to the customers. This works well in small companies. Unfortunately, in large companies, it’s not so easy when you have multiple layers of people acting as the customer. You are reporting and gathering feedback from managers and there is a large disconnect in the entire process. Scrum has clearly defined ceremonies to enable these 9 principles from Daily stand-ups, planning, sprints, estimation, refinement and retrospectives but these are number 4 to 12 in the 12 Agile Principles. A lot of these software development processes such as daily stand-ups are great to increase communication. Having retrospectives and review sessions are essentials forums to gather feedback and improve as a team. A couple of issues I found with Scrum, which I personally found anti-agile were:
The role of Product Owner is one of the main issues with the Scrum framework. They are the linchpin in Scrum. In my opinion the business has a product owner in place to be the project manager to give status updates, the team expect them to be a business analyst being bale to prepare detailed stories and specs. Mary Poppendieck discuses this problem very well.
4. Lean Avoids Feature FactoriesIn theory it might seem they are applying Agile principles but what they are really doing is building endless backlogs and feature factories. John Cutler came up with the term feature factory as he saw some companies become more interested in completing story points than learning what types of functionality users actually wanted. John viewed these organizations as factory workers assembling features without thinking about what they contributed to the product. I have a similar opinion to John as team leaders are more interested in burndown charts and hitting sprint goals than the business outcome achieved. This is how success is measured. It can be argued other Agile methodologies such as Scrum which are centred around software development teams and processes. Even though most companies I have worked with, have implemented Scrum, some better than others. There was always a disconnect to actually releasing due to testing and scheduling etc. After reading The Phoenix Project it gave me a new understanding of these struggles but from Ops team point of view instead of the feature team. Simply because a feature has been “released” from a sprint doesn’t mean that it actually goes “Live” into a production environment. I admit I took for granted the struggles of deploying code into new environments and never really understood the struggles that the development team were protected from. The Phoneix Project teaches W. Edward’s Deming ‘appreciation for the system’ which highlights the need to ensure the fast, predictable, and interrupted the flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable and secure it service. Lean project management puts the customer first. 5. Lean Project Management is Based on Toyotas SuccessThe phrase Lean Project Management is adoption from lean manufacturing which is focused in eliminating waste. Lean Manufacturing methods were developed by Toyota from studying the work process in supermarkets fulfilling stock needs. The supermarkets were able to fill the shelves with just enough product to keep the consumer happy and enough stock to keep shop owner happy. Toyota wanted to replicate this in their factories so they assigned Taiichi Ohno one of their engineers to implement it. This is in turn created lean manufacturing and the word Kanban was used by Toyota to describe the process. The word Kanban translates to signboard in Japanese (). When working in a start-up though we avoid this issue by working in teams that have full end to end accountability for delivering business outcomes. The product and tech team are actively reviewing data to make decisions to help deliver the outcomes. Lean Product Development ExplainedProduct management is critical to developing the right thing at the right time for the right people. 6. Lean Recognizes 7 Types of WasteThe 7 types of waste in lean product management include task switching, defects, waiting, extra processes, not finishing work. I feel lean is the perfect Agile methodology if you want to be a user centered organization. At its core its about providing value to the end user. The core lean tools such as Kanban Boards, Value Stream Mapping, A3 for PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act), Devops as Software development all incorporate lean thinking. 7. A3 for Easy Planning and AnalysisA3 a structured way to learn about a dilemma and explore options for improving the situation. It can include value stream maps. 8. Kanban Framework for Improved Ways of WorkingThe core principles of Lean Product Management were created by Mary and Tom Poppendick inspired by Lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing used Kanban boards such the Toyota system. Kanban is a framework for managing flow of materials or information. Kanban matches amount of work to a teams capacity giving them more flexible planning options, faster output and transparency throughout the development cycle. Kanban has one main tool the Kanban Board, which augments the traditional Iteration Backlog with additional detail by including the development steps/processes as well as introducing work limits per queue.
Even though Kanban doesn’t define a full agile life cycle it has gained popularity as it replaces the Iteration Backlog and can adapt to change a lot quicker. It is also been used by companies new to Agile as it can fit in with their current process without much interruption. Most project can be viewed as a process to achieve a desired result. Kanban is a tool for managing the process and manage the optimal flow of work within the project. There are 3 rules to implement Kanban.. Rule #1: Visual WorkflowA visual representation of the process is key for success especially with more complexed processes. To create the visual representation you need to determine the workflow of the tasks to complete the project. For software development a simple example workflow would be… Analyse -> Design -> Develop -> Test -> Release These would then get their own columns in the Kanban board. After you have created the Kanban board you need to set limits to each column. Rule #2: Limit Work in Process (WIP)The Work-In-Process (WIP) is the limit of tasks for each column. The concept is that only a number of things can be worked on at the same time to be done well. There is always an optimal amount of work that can be processed regardless of team size, organization etc. The lower the WIP the quicker bottlenecks or pain points in the process will be revealed but if too low the team will ignore them and learn nothing. Moderate WIP limits is a good compromise with a resilient team to the new process. Rule #3: Measure and ImproveSimilar to other Agile Methodologies improving the process is a constant process and based on metrics. The key metric in Kanban is the WIP and the manager should be focused on looking for the optimal WIP to get the team to reach their maximum potential. Another metric that is brought to light from Kanban boards is the cycle time to complete a task and also the manager should be looking to reduce. 9. Devops for Frequent Software Releases & Quicker FeedbackDevOps goal is shortening software delivery cycles and improving the stability of deployments. The Agile Admin’s popular blog post, What is DevOps?
defining DevOps is chronicled in The DevOps Handbook,
What feels like a departure from process is merely the continual refining of a process Some of the key management practices of Lean management and monitoring include:
As my experience with DevOps is only starting I don’t have any pet hates like I do for Scrum but Scrum does help build teams very well so with this and a new focus on continuous delivery and integration coming from Devops it might be the perfect match. I was always in favour of a Scrumban approach so maybe in the future, this might be the happy medium combined with a CI/CD release process. Via https://pm-training.net/lean-project-management-vs-agile/
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