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As the way Agile has been ruling the software development process, Lean is playing a great role in the manufacturing Industry. Lean techniques can be applied to improve agile software development processes (“lean within agile”). Or vice versa, existing agile methods can be used as valid supporting practices of lean software development (“agile within lean”). Combining both the methodologies is something many industries have been experimenting and the results vary from one another. Below are a few companies and their experience with Lean-Agile Combination.

Secondary Data Analysis research helped us to understand the results of different combinations of Lean and Agile.

Lean Principles guiding & facilitating Agile Principles.
In several organizations, Lean principles are used to guide Agile practices. Government Workflow Project, a project initiated by the government of a major California county to automate the workflow of key business processes in the criminal justice system. The project team ended up performing more up-front analysis and using small batch size for estimations as a response to frustrating velocity fluctuations and inconsistent completion of features. Initially, the team had doubt that performing additional up-front analysis was against agile principles. However, “in retrospect, the team realized this practice implements the ‘smaller batch size’ principle of Lean Software Development, and in fact increased their agility”. Notice that lean can be used as a sense-making tool retrospectively after practice is adapted. Lean Principle, eliminating waste, is a recurred theme in Sabre Airline Solutions (A.S.), a company developing products for the airline industry, encountered an agile plateau effect. In the effort of overcoming the plateau, the company chose to apply lean concepts, such as seeing waste and value chain mapping, to brainstorm the ways to improve quality and develop quality improvement goals and action plans accordingly.

Lean is seen mainly to be applied as sense-making principles in the organizations. Salesforce.com, The company has completed an agile transformation of a two hundred person team within a three-month timeframe. During this large and fast “bigbang” agile rollout, lean principles, such as empowered teams and delivering customer value early, were used as key communication tools to communicate the value of changing current behavior. If teams were feeling that something was not working the way it should be, they could refer back to the values and reject anything they thought did not correlate with their core values. Lean principles help agile behaviors to stick.

Capital One, used the lens of lean to evaluate the current delivery process and streamline the business values prior to agile transition. Lean principle “Eliminate Waste” and tools value stream mapping, root-cause analysis (5whys) were applied to analyze the processes of a product or service type before Scrum was chosen as the adopted agile method. According to the experience of the company, lean tools and principles can help achieving a smoother transition and will increase the likelihood of a successful agile pilot with tangible business metrics. This claim is supported by the experience of Systematic, an independent software systems company, which is described in two experience reports.Systematic made a strategic decision to use lean as the dominant paradigm for future improvements after achieving CMMI level 5 and identified Lean Software Development as the lean dialect most relevant to Systematic.

Régis Medina, leading Lean IT expert from Europe, in one of his interview, stated the three main issues that Agile teams face today.
 * 1) Making the right products
 * 2) Delivering more at the end of each iteration
 * 3) Learning how to better collaborate with the other departments

Personally, after 10 years practicing agile, Regis decided to step back a little and took the opportunity to learn lean in other areas of IT under the guidance of real lean sensei. When he saw really spectacular results in various domains, he realized that there was a huge opportunity here for the agile community. In his words, "Lean and agile are perfectly compatible but very different in nature. Lean is not a process or a toolbox for improving processes, but a management practice that individuals develop along the years with the help of their sensei"

Agile strengthen the collaboration and communication between the stakeholders of the project and creates an environment that helps the teams do a better job at an acceptable pace. This aspect is very close to lean’s “Respect for people”. But lean goes a lot further with the notion of training. In lean, investing in skills development and improving everyone’s capacity of judgment is the key to success. The main lean question being: “who needs to learn what for the company to succeed?”

Implementation of Lean-Agile Combination in IT
Herbert Illgner, COO Business Solutions, and Technology at SAP said that SAP is expanding the application of Agile methods to the entire product creation process using a Lean framework that includes empowered cross-functional teams, continuous improvement process, and managers as support and teachers.

In practice, Agile seems to be changing for the better by adopting Lean thinking in a large way. Rally says that its customers get to market 50% faster and are 25% more productive when they employ a hybrid of Lean and Agile development methods. Given the way that Agile fits into the Lean framework, it wouldn't surprise me if before too long Agile is considered a branch of Lean practice tailored for the software industry.