At2010 lean ideas for agile v5 1

Lean Concepts for Managing Agile Projects

Govindarajan SThoughtworks India

2010 October

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Increase in Project Success Rate

From the 1994 levels

100%

34%

an

Source: Standish Report on project success rate

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“The primary reason is the projects have

gotten a lot Smaller.

Doing projects with

Iterative processing as opposed to the waterfall method,

which called for all project requirementsto be defined up front, is a major step

forward.”

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1 Iterative, more critically Incremental2 Releasing Working Software frequently

3 Good Delivery Cadence4 Adaptive Planning

5 Empowers Customers with Transparency6 Fail Fast

Elements of Agile Projects

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Game Changer

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Increased Adoption

35%

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What do we want to do today ?

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Smells That We See in Agile Projects

Analysis of the Root Causes

Foundation for Lean

How Lean can help us in our Quest !

• No concept of shippable software

• No adaptive planning

• No concept of capacity or throughput

• No meaningful retrospectives

• Quality Issues

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Working Software frequently

Working Software as a measure of Progress

Shorter Time scale

Trusted & Motivated Individuals

Reflects & Fine tune work

Source: Survey by Prof Laurie Williams North Carolina University, quoting from Mike Cohn’s blog

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Cadence Ship SW DONE

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Adaptive PlanningThroughput Reflect

Theory Of Constraints

• Focus on throughput, rather than improving individual processes

• Enables one to look at the process in terms of the weakest link

• Manage the constraint to get a grip on the throughput

• Enables you to have a good measure on the Capacity

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“Kanban to promotes flow and reduced cycle-

time by limiting WIP and pulling value through in a visible manner.”

“Kanban helps our team contribute to the business by promoting flow and reducing cycle-time through a limited WIP and a fully

transparent value pulling system.”“Value Pull, Limited WIP, and Visibility can create an ecosystem

where teams have the opportunity to improve.”

Source: www.limitedwipsociety.org

•Visualize the Workflow• Limit Work In Progress•Measure and Manage Flow•Make process policies explicit•Use models to improve

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Lean

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Purposeful Value Chain

Value Chain Clarity

• Represents the process by which a requirement is taken into Production

• Represents the stages where value is added

Backlog Analysis Ready for Dev In Dev Dev Done In QA Atmn Done Deployed

Flow

In Process

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Limit Requirements processed

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Throughput - Guarantees MMF at the end of the cycle

WIP Addresses

Keeps Inventory Low and guarantees Quality

Pull & One Piece Flow

• Fall out to the WIP.oWIP triggers pull• Pull based system ensures a

balanced work flow• Push is never ideal as

compared to pull

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Precise Metrics

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What do you measure ?

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Finally….• Start slowly• Focus on Your Value Chain• Accurately Measure Progress• Retrospect• Use Stand ups to pull and adapt• Inculcate a culture of continuous

improvement

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Questions ?

Credits: Stock Photos – www.sxc.hu

govinds@thoughtworks.com