Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale (Lean (O'Reilly))

by Jez Humble

Remember, metrics are meant to hurt — not to make us feel l...

Once leaders see evidence of rampant growth with us operating with unscalable processes, we’ll easily be able to secure people, funding, and support to build robust solutions to handle the flow of demand. Our goal should to be to create a pull system for customers that want our product, service, or tools, not push a mandated, planned, and baked solution upon people that we must “sell” or require them to use.

This allows teams more time with customers to listen, build trust, and ensure early adopters that we’re ready to help. Remember, reaching big numbers is not a big win; meeting unmet needs and delighting customers is.

In the early stage we are still learning, not earning.

Features delivered are not a measure of success, business outcomes are.

If we want to learn, we must have empathy for our users and experience their pain.

Our advice is this. There are two practices that should be adhered to from the beginning that will allow us to pay down technical debt later on: continuous integration and a small number of basic unit and user-journey tests.

Figure 5-4. Percentage of product portfolio for the three innovation horizons over time

Lean development and operations are interrelated and complementary, but very different in nature. Lean operations emphasizes standardization and reduction of waste, uncertainty, and variation in order to create efficient processes that produce consistent, quality products.

Every organization will take its own path to address changes, aligned to its own business objectives; to create lasting results, we must enable teams to try things out and learn what works and what doesn’t for themselves.

Use continuous delivery to reduce the risk of releases, decrease cycle time, and make it economic to work in small batches.

Increase and amplify feedback loops to make smaller, more frequent decisions based on the information we learn from performing our work to maximize customer value.

The paradox is that when managers focus on productivity, long-term improvements are rarely made. On the other hand, when managers focus on quality, productivity improves continuously. John Seddon

Achieving high performance in organizations that treat software as a strategic advantage relies on alignment between the IT function and the rest of the organization, along with the ability of IT to execute. It pays off.

In contrast, companies whose engineering teams do a good job of delivering their work on schedule and simplifying their systems achieve better business results with much lower cost bases, even if their IT investments aren’t aligned with business priorities.

The researchers concluded that to achieve high performance, companies that rely on software should focus first and foremost on their ability to execute, build reliable systems, and work to continually reduce complexity.

Only then will pursuing alignment with business pr...

Table 6-1. Activities of the HP LaserJet Firmware team in 2008 % of costs Activity 10% Code integration 20% Detailed planning 25% Porting code between version control branches 25% Product support 15% Manual testing ~5% Innovation This revealed a great deal of no-value-add activity in their work, such as porting code between branches and detailed upfront planning. The large amount spent on current product support also indicated a problem with the quality of the software being produced.

A kata is “a routine you practice deliberately, so its pattern becomes a habit.”

A target condition identifies the process being addressed, sets the date by which we aim to achieve the specified condition, and specifies measurable details of the process as we want it to exist.

This is the essence of agile: teams do not become agile by adopting a methodology. Rather, true agility means that teams are constantly working to evolve their processes to deal with the particular obstacles they are facing at any given time.

When you practice the Improvement Kata, process improvement becomes planned work, similar to building product increments. The key is that we don’t plan how we will achieve the target condition, nor do we create epics, features, stories, or tasks. Rather, the team works this out through experimentation over the course of an iteration.

Kata, The Improvement Kata Handbook, available for free on his website at http://bit.ly/11iBzlY

The first thing to observe is that the target conditions (or “exit criteria” as they are known in FutureSmart) are all measurable conditions. Indeed, they fulfill all the elements of SMART objectives: they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound (the latter by virtue of the iterative process). Furthermore, many of the target conditions were not focused on features to be delivered but on attributes of the system, such as quality, and on activities designed to validate these attributes, such as automated tests. Finally,

“It’s surprising what you learn in a month and have to adjust based on discovery in development.”

If we achieve the results by ignoring the process, we do not learn how to improve the process.

If we do not improve the process, we cannot repeatably achieve better results.

We must set measurable objectives for each next small delivery step. Even these are subject to constant modification as we learn about reality.

In large programs, demonstrating improvement within an iteration requires ingenuity and discipline.

changed the economics of the software delivery process by adopting continuous delivery, comprehensive test automation, an iterative and adaptive approach to program management,

Even today, many people think that Lean is a management-led activity and that it’s about simply cutting costs. In reality, it requires investing to remove waste and reduce failure demand — it is a worker-led activity that, ultimately, can continuously drive down costs and improve quality and productivity.

which is why it’s important to make it visible by activity accounting, including measuring the cycle time and the time spent serving failure demand such as rework.

The solution is to use the same mechanism to manage both demand and improvement work.

Another important consideration is the way enterprises treat metrics. In a control culture, metrics and targets are often set centrally and never updated in response to the changes in behavior they produce. Generative organizations don’t manage by metrics and targets. Instead, the FutureSmart management “use[s] the metrics to understand where to have conversations about what is not getting done.”20 This is part of the strategy of “Management by Wandering Around” pioneered by HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.21

If people are punished for failing to meet

targets or metrics, one of the fallouts is that they start manipulating work and information to look like they are meeting the targets.

The key characteristics of the Improvement Kata are its iterativeness and the ability to drive an experimental approach to achieve the desired target conditions, which makes it suitable for working in conditions of uncertainty. The Improvement Kata is also an effective way to develop the capabilities of people throughout the enterprise so they can self-organize in response to changing conditions.

Implementing an enterprise-level continuous improvement process is a prerequisite for any ongoing large-scale transformation effort (such as adopting an agile approach to software delivery) at scale. True continuous improvement never ends because, as our organization and environment evolve, we find that what works for us today will not be effective when conditions change. High-performance organizations are constantly evolving to adapt to their environment, and they do so in an organic way, not through command and control.

Preguntas para mi

Do teams in your organization regularly reflect on the processes they use and find ways to experiment to improve them? What feedback loops are in place to find out which ideas worked and which didn’t? How long does it take to get this feedback?

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. Peter Drucker

The measure of execution in product development is our ability to constantly align our plans to whatever is, at the moment, the best economic choice. Donald Reinertsen and Stefan Thomke

Lean Thinking provides a proven alternative which “can be summarized in five principles: precisely specify value by specific product, identify the value stream for each product, make value flow without interruptions, let the customer pull value from the producer, and pursue perfection.”1

In this chapter we show how the five lean principles were adopted by Maersk to reduce the cycle time of new features by over 50% while simultaneously increasing quality and return on investment.

Based on the desired outcomes of “more value, faster flow, and better quality,” Arnold and Yüce chose eight goals for all teams: Get to initial prioritization faster Improve prioritization using Cost of Delay Pull requirements from Dynamic Priority List Reduce the size of requirements Quickly get to the point of writing code Actively manage work in progress Enable faster feedback Enable smooth, sustainable flow Previously, features had always been batched up into projects, resulting in many

lower-value features being delivered along with a few high-value ones.

The HiPPO method (highest paid person’s opinion) was used to decide which features were high-value, and a great deal of effort was spent trying to find the “right ideas” and analyzing them in detail so as...

Dynamic Priority List.