Recently I had a discussion with Alan Shalloway, the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. Alan is an industry thought leader, trainer and coach in the areas of Lean software development and the Lean/Agile field. He’s a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide, as well as a trainer and a coach.

An excerpt from this conversation:

Joe:  Talking about Lean Agile and the evolution of it, you’re taking a more empirical view of it. It should be more of the business enterprise type. Is that the evolution, that agile is growing to be a larger umbrella, let’s say?

Alan:  There are parts of agile that I say are outside of lean, if you believe in how do I create it so teams can operate from a team centered point of view. But, again, yes, I’m saying that you should have a business driven view of things.

Now I want to put a caveat in here. When I teach our lean agile courses, one of the things I always say at the very start of the course is I say, "Now, lean doesn’t work everywhere. There is a caveat you’ve got to be very careful about. That is that your business has to be in the business of making money by adding value to your customers."

Now, not all businesses are in the business of doing that. There is the classic case of Enron, for example. But, even businesses that you would say are reputable and all of that. There are some like defense contractors that make their money on a cost plus basis. Now in a lot of ways, the last thing they’d want to do if they’re really committed to cost plus is lean because it’s going to lower their cost and it’s going to lower their revenue.

However, fortunately ‑‑ I happen to know, I’ve done some work in the defense area‑‑ the government is starting to recognize what they really want is value and people are doing lean and agile and they’re saying we’re going to lower our cost and raise our quality, add more value, are actually starting to win contracts, which is a good thing.

Now, if that’s the case, how can the business respond to external influences such as competition or new technology? Or how can they respond to internal influences such as new ideas and new people that come in that have different ideas on how to do things, new insights? Business agility is the ability to respond quickly to these internal and external changes and increase revenue and decrease risks.

Now, team agility, which is really what I would say the first‑generation of XP and Scrum are geared to, are really about team agility. They’re about how a team responds quickly. Well the team is like thinking of the team as an engine. So first‑generation methods are about the engine in your car, but your car may not be going fast not because of the engine, it may be the transmission or the driver’s driving the wrong way.

So I look at enterprise agility and obviously to the whole car, in business the driver, Scrum and XP or even combine at the team level they’ve added since combine, is kind of like still more of a team centered approach but it’s got a little bit more management and integration. More importantly, in my mind, it acknowledges lean as a science or that there’s a science underneath this, the theory of flow and managing your work in progress to be less in your capacity or not greater than your capacity.

So we take this bigger view. I think the agile camp or a good part of it is still focused totally on the team and they say you start an agile transition by making a team better. When in fact I’ve seen some times that that’s absolutely the worst thing you can do. I’ve seen companies start agile transitions where the team pilot

This blog was Part 2 of 2, Part 1: The differences in Lean and Agile

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On the Busienss901 Podcast I had the pleasure this week interviewing Eric Landes. Eric is an Agile Project Manager who has been using Kanban for software development since 2007. He has worked with Scrum, XP and other agile methods for over the past 5 years, and has been managing software projects for over 10 years. Eric has his own blog, Corporate Coder which can be found at http://EricLandes.com. He is also a frequent contributor to http://developer.com.

Eric first caught my eye when I was reviewing the conference speakers and workshops being hosted by the Lean Software and Systems Conference held last April in Atlanta. I had noticed that he was presenting a real life scenario of how an Operations Group’s Kanban adoption failed to improve cycle times. The session ended up in a 5 Why session and a Q & A to discuss other situations that had not produced results. I thought it was an excellent way to stimulate discussion and to learn more about Kanban versus the typical “this is what we did” approach.

This approach also told me a lot about the person. Someone that is comfortable with their failures to me represents someone that has a lot of self-confidence and most of time knowledge. My instincts were not proven wrong. The podcast was down to earth with little if any lets change the culture rhetoric we so often hear. Our discussion started with Agile drilling down to Scrum, the last twenty minutes on Kanban and what he has learned implementing it. This is someone that knows what to do with a sticky note!

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Can you be talented enough on your own? One of the tremendous powers of continuous improvement and whether you want to call it Lean, Six Sigma, Agile or even Scrum is the power of the team and collaboration. Cross-functional teams create high-bandwidth communication. It is not about individual talent, though it can help, it is more about effective collaboration.

See what John Hagel, co-author of The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion says about Talent.

Individual Talent certainly helps but when the Yankees lost all the role players in the early 2000’s it took a long time for them to re-build a team…starting with star power doesn’t hurt, but does it get you there?

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