Part II. Lean Project Management

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

—Peter Drucker

“An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.”  —Stephen Covey

Lean Provides Guidance

Complex problems often require complex solutions. Simple solutions that work in some situations may fail miserably, and at great cost, in others. If we hold on to solutions because they work in one area, we may never quite understand, until it is too late, why they don’t work in others.

Software development is clearly a complex problem. It takes place over a wide range of circumstances. Many factors vary widely, such as the following:

• Physical location of team members (together, apart)

• Size of team (2–2000)

• Number of teams (one to hundreds)

• Skills of teams

• Experience of teams

• Organization of skill sets (distributed or in silos)

• Problem domain (IT application, embedded system, product)

• Technology used (Java, .Net, specialized)

• Availability of customer (none, full-time)

• Quality and style of management (command-and-control, leadership)

One size does not fit all.

Currently, one of the biggest challenges to advancing Lean-Agile methods throughout the software industry is the lack of foundational thinking being presented to new practitioners. Some proponents of popular methods take pride in this, but we think this approach is flawed. In particular, Scrum is represented as a framework within which to hold what you need to know. Although many people in software-development organizations are very capable, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. Developers should be encouraged to take advantage of what has been discovered in other industries as well as within our own.

Lean provides a new paradigm for management, one that can help managers transition from a command-and-control stance to one in which they are leading teams. From this leadership position, managers can assist teams in adopting the best practices of the Agile industry. These include using the Lean concept of fast-flexible-flow to improve product-portfolio management, Scrum and Kanban for team management, and design patterns and Test-Driven Development to enhance teams’ technical skills.

In simple situations, we can afford for teams to figure things out on their own. But transitioning to an Agile enterprise presents bigger problems. It requires incorporating all the knowledge and skills we have along with what others have demonstrated. One of Lean’s great strengths is its ability to incorporate knowledge into a framework that can be used in a consistent, unified manner.