Lean has been essential to many successful businesses for decades. It is a learning experience, and in this post, I will show you how I have come to discover more and more what the lean principle “optimize the whole” means:
2003: Optimize the whole = Optimize project deliveries
I started
out thinking it was much to gain by optimizing the project delivery process. We
focused on how we could deliver software that was tested and that fulfilled the
requirements from operations -doing it as effective and as fast as possible.
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| Handover - Tableatny @ Flickr |
2007: Optimize the whole = Optimize the sw life cycle
Around 2007
I realized that we had so much more to gain by optimizing the whole development
life cycle: from idea via concept, implementation, testing, installation in
production, upgrading and rollback. (yes, moving away from waterfall.)
It was
popular to start using more agile development approaches, Scrum and Kanban. I
got to work in agile teams; the concept phase, implementation, test and deployment
happens within short sprints, even in some large organizations. This is a great improvement,
and it is a delivery thing. Getting the software out there, in order to be
used, not stored, being able to focus on the features that are actually used! and getting better and better at devilvering the right features. Fantastic!
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| What a great difference!! |
2012: Optimize the whole = optimize the customer journey
What if you
are great at producing the right features and great at deploying it easily to
production, but the customer never get to hear about the product in the first
place? Or the customer is not able to get started? Or it is almost impossible
to buy the product?
I learned
that the whole customer journey was what really matter to the customer. To me,
this is the next step if you are into advanced lean thinking: Optimizing the
whole value chain, seen from a customer point of view.
So what can
you do to get better at this? This is what we did:
- Identify the customer (define the relevant personas)
- Identify the steps in your customer journey
- What works well?
- What are your weak spots? where do you lose your customers?
- Any low hanging fruits?
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| The customer journey |
The best
organizations consists of units that support the whole customer journey, they
are able to handle, improve and truly optimize for the whole. (not only the
whole software development process, but the whole customer journey)
Pitfall: I have
worked in a team where too many people was looking into step number 4, and unfortunately,
the areas of most interest was outside the responsibility of our business unit.
This is not a good situation, it is damaging to the motivation of the
individual and it prevent the team’s ability to deliver if the focus is on what
you cannot change. In an ideal world, anything can be changed, and anything can
be changed easily.
Top performing organizations will change according to what
makes sense, but the larger it is, and the more silos you have, the longer time
it take. It also require sweat and lots of hard work, and some tears. Trust is
a key word in agile software development, and the same goes for lean
leadership; each employee must be able to trust that the top management is
handling flaws between business units.
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| Trust |
Where in
the lean journey are you?
What is
your next steps?
What is pitfalls have you experienced?
