Through many years of experience in leading and adapting broad lean-agile transformations, a pattern of seven concrete practice sets is emerging as a holistic systems framework for driving successful outcomes. I call these the 7 Sure Steps for Sustainable Lean-Agile Transformations. Importantly, the dynamic sequence for adoption of these practice sets is increasingly important to recognize.
7 Sure Steps for Sustainable Lean-Agile Transformations:
- Value Focus (outcomes focus, including OKRs)
- Visibility (visual feedback for the team and leadership; e.g., information radiators)
- Ranking / Alignment (quantitative stack rank ordering of value increments)
- Managing Work in Process (WIP limits; concentrate focus on value realization)
- Technical Practices and Team Skills (e.g., BDD, TDD, design patterns, collaboration, critical problem solving, design of experiments, holistic systems thinking)
- Full Value Stream (broad inter-disciplinary engagement)
- Solution Life Cycle (strategic and tactical feedback for dynamic guidance control)
As a sequence, each step adds sustainable value; each step adds value in any sequence, yet the sequence presented here builds for sustainability. Each step can add value on its own, but if the preceding step in the sequence is not accomplished then results are diminished over time and sustainability decays. For example, addressing Visibility is progress, but if Visibility is simply into activities and not Value, then that progress makes limited difference from a business impact perspective. Similarly for the Technical Practices and Team Skills, if the teams have those skills but are applying to “output activities” rather than true “Value delivery” then business impact tends to be short-lived and not generally scalable in an interdisciplinary way.
The key points here are that there are seven sets of practices and that there is a sequence of applicability for those practices when viewed within the holistic systems approach to lean-agile transformations. Each of these 7 Sure Steps will be described more fully in future posts.