The Agile Executive

As the recent podcast with Dean was held prior to the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference in Miami, I enquired through email about his major takeaways from the conference. Here is Dean’s answer:

I obviously think Lean Software will be big. It will be to the enterprise what Scrum is to teams.

I believe that Kanban (a subset of lean, being used as an agile team method now), will be more readily adopted in 3-5 years than Scrum.

Reasons:

• Easier to adopt at the team level.
• Far less overhead for planning and estimating, and fewer ceremonies (approaching zero in the edge case and with appropriate context).
• Based on both solid science and people aspects: theory of constraints, continuous flow and pull. Kaizen mind.
• Much easier to sell to PMO and VP level folks where agile=Dilbert=bad, and Lean=Toyota=good. Plus you can lean a PMO with value stream analysis and other tools. What do you do in a PMO with Scrum?
• Support from industry stalwarts such as Lockheed Martin, who are applying proven lean manufacturing practices to software development for projects like the Joint Strike Fighter. i.e industries on the other side of the agile chasm are adopting Lean now and will provide creature comfort for enterprises considering the leap.
• Plus agile already has a bad rap (perhaps undeserved) in many of those places; lean does not.
• Lean and Lean SSC’s focus on the role of management in continuous improvement and problem solving, as opposed to agile, where management is either a “chicken” (you can attend our meetings, but you have no role in our process…)  or an “impediment” (If you attend an agile conference,  manager’s, CEOs etc are routinely denigrated; that does not help our industry).
• Lean provides richer tools for improvement for the manager and practitioners – Kaizen meetings, five whys, root cause analysis, theory of constraints, flow and pull science and metrics,  cumulative flow diagrams, etc. rather than just  the single “retrospective.”
• Question: does agile scale? In my opinion, yes, but it is arguable in the industry. Question: Does Lean scale – Yes, not remotely arguable. Lean started at scale.
• Lean optimizes the whole enterprise and gives you tools to reason about the enterprise, from order to shipment, rather than just the team optimization. 
• Potential for leadership from the Lean SSC as an open, science and knowledge-based consortium with an academic and industry approved certification process for managers and practitioners.
   
  I could go on and on, this is just the short list.

In addition to Dean’s insightful points, a guest post on the conference will soon be published in this blog by colleague John Heintz. If you look for stroke-by-stroke coverage of the conference, Mike Cottmeyer‘s posts on the subject in Leading Agile are very informative.