What is Lean Agile Delivery?
Agile refers to a set of values and principles put forth in the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto was a reaction against heavyweight methodologies that were popular. Agile project management is an iterative approach to delivering a project throughout its life cycle. The key benefit of iteration is that project team can adjust their plan as they go along rather than following a linear path.
Agile techniques have become one of the fastest growing and most popular way to manage IT projects, but it is not designed to be restricted to just software development.
Lean Agile Delivery evolves from Agile project management. The framework integrates action planning with execution, It can be applied to manage improvement initiatives e.g. executing action plan from a Lean action workout, or to run routine day-to-day work e.g. managing customer complaint lifecycles.
The 7 Guiding Principles of Lean Agile Delivery are:
Eliminate Waste – Add nothing but value.
Optimise the Whole – Think end-to-end from a customer perspective.
Build Quality In – Do the right things right, the first time and every time.
Deliver Fast – Speed is the absence of Waste.
Respect People – Centre on the people who add value.
Defer Commitment – Best time to make decisions is Just In Time.
Create Knowledge – Learn, reflect and adapt systematically.
At the core, Lean and Agile share the same values and behaviours of trust, collaboration, flexibility and empowerment. Applying these Lean Agile principles can improve the chance of completion for an initiative and to ensure it can continue to deliver results over time.
A good Lean & Agile team picks and choses the management & technical practices that best work for them. A bad one just picks a couple of practices and falsely believes that somehow “makes them Agile”.
Organisations that are truly lean & agile have a strong competitive advantage because they respond very rapidly and in a highly disciplined manner to market demand instead of predicting the further.