Lean Agile Mindset Flashcards
Lean-Agile Mindset
The Lean-Agile Mindset is the combination of beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and actions of SAFe leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto and Lean thinking. It’s the personal, intellectual, and leadership foundation for adopting and applying SAFe principles and practices.
The Lean-Agile mindset forms the cornerstone of a new management approach and an enhanced company culture that enables Business Agility. It provides leadership with the tools needed to drive a successful SAFe transformation, helping individuals and the entire enterprise achieve their goals.
Mindset Awareness and Openness to Chang
A mindset is the mental lens through which we view the world around us. It is how the human brain simplifies, categorizes, and interprets the vast amount of information it receives each day. Through a lifetime of structured learning (classes, reading) and unstructured lessons (life events, work experience), we form our mindsets. They reside in the subconscious mind and manifest themselves as deeply held beliefs, attitudes, assumptions, and influences. Consequently, individuals are often unaware of how their mindsets influence how they carry out their responsibilities and interact with others. For example, many leaders develop beliefs through business school training and on-the-job experiences that are grounded in legacy waterfall, stage-gated, and siloed ways of working.
Thinking Lean with the SAFe House of Lean
Lean thinking can be summarized as follows [7]:
Precisely specify value by product
Identify the value stream for each product
Make value flow without interruptions
Let the customer pull value from the producer
Pursue perfection
The Goal: Value
Pillar 1 – Respect for People and Culture
A Lean-Agile approach doesn’t implement itself or perform any real work—people do.
Respect for people and culture is a basic human need. When treated with respect, people are empowered to evolve their practices and improve. Management challenges people to change and may steer them toward better ways of working.
However, it’s the teams and individuals who learn problem-solving and reflection skills and are accountable for making the appropriate improvements.
The driving force behind this new behavior is a generative culture, which is characterized by a positive, safe, performance-centric environment [8]. Achieving this culture requires the enterprise and its leaders to change first.
The principle of respect for people and culture also extends to relationships with Suppliers, partners, customers, and the broader community that supports the Enterprise.
When there’s an urgency for positive change, transforming culture is possible. First, understand and implement the SAFe values and principles. Second, deliver winning results.
The culture will change naturally over time.
Pillar 2 – Flow
The key to successfully executing SAFe is to establish a continuous flow of work that supports incremental value delivery based on constant feedback and adjustment. Continuous flow enables faster sustainable value delivery, effective Built-In Quality practices, relentless improvement, and evidence-based governance based on working components of the solution.
The principles of flow are an essential part of the Lean-Agile mindset. These include understanding the full Development Value Stream, visualizing and limiting Work in Process (WIP), and reducing batch sizes and managing queue lengths. Additionally, Lean focus on identifying and continuously removing delays and waste (non-value-added activities). One critical move that organizations must address to achieve flow is the shift from a start-stop-start project management process to an agile product management approach aligned to long-lived development value streams.
Pillar 3 – Innovation
Flow builds a solid foundation for value delivery. But without innovation, both product and process will steadily decline. To support this critical part of the SAFe House of Lean, Lean-Agile Leaders engage in the following practices:
Hire, coach, and mentor innovation and entrepreneurship in the organization’s workforce Go see…get out of the office and into the actual workplace where the value is produced, and products are created and used (known as gemba).
As Taiichi Ohno put it, “No useful improvement was ever invented at a desk.”
Provide time and space for people to be creative to enable purposeful innovation. This can rarely occur in the presence of 100 percent utilization and daily firefighting. SAFe’s Innovation and Planning Iteration is one such opportunity.
Apply Continuous Exploration, the process of constantly exploring the market and user needs, getting fast feedback on experiments, and defining a Vision, Roadmap, and set of Features that bring the most promising innovations to market.
Validate the innovation with customers, then pivot without mercy or guilt when the hypothesis needs to change.
Engage both top-down strategic thinking with organic team-based innovations to create a synergistic ‘innovation riptide’ that powers a tidal wave of new products, services, and capabilities.
Pillar 4 – Relentless Improvement
The fourth pillar, relentless improvement, encourages learning and growth through continuous reflection and process enhancements.
A constant sense of competitive danger drives the company to pursue improvement opportunities aggressively.
Leaders and teams do the following:
Optimize the whole, not the parts, of both the organization and the development process
Reinforce the problem-solving mindset throughout the organization, where all are empowered to engage in daily improvements to the work
Reflect at key milestones to openly identify and address the shortcomings of the process at all levels
Apply Lean tools and techniques to determine the fact-based root cause of inefficiencies and apply effective countermeasures rapidly
Additional guidance on the importance of innovation and relentless improvement in achieving business agility can be found in the Continuous Learning Culture competency article.
Foundation – Leadership
The foundation of Lean is leadership, a key enabler for team success. Leaders are ultimately responsible for the successful adoption of the Lean-Agile approach. According to management consultant and efficiency expert W. Edwards Deming, “Such a responsibility cannot be delegated” [9] to direct reports, Lean-Agile champions, working groups, a Program Management Office (PMO), process teams, outside consultants, or any other party. Therefore, leaders must be trained in these new and innovative ways of thinking and exhibit the principles and behaviors of Lean-Agile leadership.
From a leadership perspective, Lean is different than Agile. Agile was developed as a team-based process for a small group of cross-functional, dedicated individuals who were empowered, skilled, and needed to build working functionality in a short time box. Management was not part of this definition. But excluding management from the way of working doesn’t scale in an enterprise. By contrast, in Lean, managers are leaders who embrace the values of Lean, are competent in the basic practices, and teach these practices to others. They proactively eliminate impediments and take an active role in driving organizational change and facilitating relentless improvement.
The Values of the Agile Manifesto
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Deming notes, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.” So, agile processes in frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe do matter. However, a process is only a means to an end. When we’re captive to a process that isn’t working, it creates waste and delays. So, favor individuals and interactions, then modify processes accordingly.
In a distributed environment, tools are critically important to assist with communication and collaboration (e.g., video conferencing, text messaging, ALM tools, and wikis).
This is especially true at scale. However, tools should supplement, rather than replace, face-to-face communication.
Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation
Documentation is important and has value. But creating documents for the sake of complying with potentially outdated corporate governance models has no value.
As part of a change program, governance, often captured by documentation standards, needs to be updated to reflect the Lean-Agile way of working. Rather than create detailed documentation too early—especially the wrong kind—it’s more valuable to show customers working software to get their feedback.
Therefore, favor working software. And document only what’s truly needed.
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
Customers are the ultimate deciders of value, so their close collaboration is essential in the development process.
To convey the rights, responsibilities, and economic concerns of each party, contracts are often necessary—but recognize that contracts can over-regulate what to do and how to do it.
No matter how well they’re written, they don’t replace regular communication, collaboration, and trust.
Instead, contracts should be win–win propositions. Win–lose contracts usually result in poor economic outcomes and distrust, creating contentious short-term relationships instead of long-term business partnerships. Instead, favor customer collaboration.
Responding to Change over Following a Plan
Change is a reality that the development process must reflect. The strength of Lean-Agile development is in how it embraces change. As the system evolves, so does the understanding of the problem and the solution domain.
Business stakeholder knowledge also improves over time, and customer needs evolve as well. Indeed, those changes in understanding add value to our system.
Of course, the manifesto phrase “over following a plan” indicates that there is, in fact, a plan! Planning is an important part of Agile development. Indeed, Agile teams and programs plan more often and more continuously than their counterparts using a waterfall process.
However, plans must adapt as new learning occurs, new information becomes visible, and the situation changes.
Worse, evaluating success by measuring conformance to a plan drives the wrong behaviors (e.g., following a plan in the face of evidence that the plan is not working).
Agile Manifesto Principles
Most of these principles are self-explanatory. They need no elaboration, except for a discussion of applying the Agile Manifesto at scale, which is covered next.
The combination of values and principles in the manifesto creates a framework for what the Snowbird attendees believed was the essence of Agile.
There is mounting evidence from success stories in all industries across every geography demonstrating the extraordinary business and personal benefits conferred by this new way of thinking and working. We are grateful for it.
