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Hi. My name is Alan Zucker.
I am the curator of
the Project Management
Principles series
here for Henry Stewart Talks.
I have over 25 years of
experience managing projects and
programs in Fortune
100 companies.
I live outside of Washington DC
and teach at major universities;
the University of Georgia,
the University of Virginia, and
also with leading international
training companies.
In this session,
we're going to talk
about the Lean Agile mindset.
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Lean is a basic building
block of Agile.
When we talk about Lean,
we also talk about Kanban.
When we think about Lean,
we're focusing on
eliminating waste.
When we talk about Kanban,
we're focusing on improving
the flow of work.
Lean and Kanban were
actually principles
developed by Toyota
back in the 1950s as a way of
managing their auto
manufacturing facilities.
We've adopted many of
these principles in Agile.
These principles are now
expanding into other
knowledge work areas.
1:12
Often we use the idea or
the concept of describing
the house of Lean.
The roof of the house of
Lean is delivering value.
We want to focus on delivering
value to our customers.
The foundation of the house
of Lean is leadership.
We recognize the
importance of leaders in
establishing the culture
for the organization,
establishing the way
people are going to work.
We want our leaders
to demonstrate
the principles and values
that they think are true.
We all have experience
with leaders
who say one thing
and then do another.
Here we want to make
sure that the leaders
walk the walk as well
as talk the talk.
We also want to develop a
sense of systems thinking.
Systems thinking is
recognizing that
everything we do is part
of a greater whole.
We want to avoid optimizing
one part of the process at
the expense of another.
We also want to
build in quality.
We want to establish
process integrity.
As Dr. Edwards Deming said,
we cannot inspect quality in,
you have to build it in
every step of the process.
The pillars that support
the roof are respect
for people and culture.
We recognize that our people,
that our employees are
the ones that deliver
value to our customers and
that's a very important role.
We also value transparency.
Lean processes, Kanban,
Agile processes
promote transparency.
When there's
transparency, it creates
greater accountability
and it creates
the opportunity for people to
collaborate more effectively.
We also want to develop Flow.
Flow is a way of
creating a flow of work.
It avoids the peaks and valleys,
the hurry ups and waits.
It avoids overburdening
the system.
The last pillar is
relentless improvement.
We always want to be focusing
on what do we need to
do to improve our
customer experience,
improve our processes,
improve the way we work.
Through that relentless
improvement, that Kaizen,
that small change for good,
we continue to get better
and better over time.
