InfoQ Homepage Lean Content on InfoQ
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Lean-Agile Procurement for Outsourcing
One of the last barriers to organisations becoming agile in their operations is the procurement process. At the recent Agilia Conference, Mirko Kleiner presented on Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to negotiating service contracts which involves procurement specialists, IT teams and suppliers, to move from a combative stance to a collaborative approach to addressing the customers’ needs.
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How the Dutch Railways Applies Agile and Lean
The mindset that goes with agile and lean philosophies is quite similar; lean amplifies agile and vice versa. Agile practices are suitable for the development of complex products, and lean practices help to look for opportunities to reduce waste in your processes. Lean helps to see results from the customer's point of view, from start to delivery, whereas agile supports delivering optimal value.
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The Toyota Way at Codeweavers
Codeweavers combines the Toyota way with extreme programming and continuous delivery in development and support to do small, frequent releases. The advice to apply the Toyota way is to start with the books, understand the philosophy, and begin teaching it to others.
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Putting Quality Back in Agile with Lean
The agile manifesto and lean practices are very complementary; lean can be a useful addition to a very strong agile process to increase quality. Interviewing real clients or client proxies to deeply understand their pain points and visualizing the process by diving into the handovers between departments helps to uncover problems faster and fix those problems more efficiently for a lower price.
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Refocusing e-Commerce with Lean
Auchan:Direct, the online grocery delivery service of Auchan France, decided to apply lean to develop a new e-Commerce website. Their CEO was the first customer and they used continuous and fast feedback from their clients on the new experience to improve website quality using continuous delivery.
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Lean Organisations for the Digital Age
Lean IT should help to simplify and improve the way we create value for customers and develop better solutions for tomorrow. Organisations of the future will focus on horizontal product or service streams- and everything else, including experts and managers, is there to enable the front-line to do their work right-first-time-on-time, with no hassles.
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Applying Hoshin Kanri at Toyota
Toyota uses Hoshin Kanri to give direction on where they want to improve using Lean IT. Employees at various levels can exchange ideas about Hoshin items, and potentially get them approved by higher management. This approach makes results stronger and increases buy- in from the employees who contribute upfront.
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Lean and Agile Culture at the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle
Scaling lean and agile is not a question of frameworks, it's about values, principles and mindset. At Yle the company management has been involved in the agile transformation by carrying out experiments, learning and doing; not by implementing frameworks. Magic happens when you work together with people in teams on all levels.
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Driving Improvements with Lean Pilots
Lean, agile and Lean Startup can strengthen each other for driving improvement. Lean Pilots, a data-driven improvement framework for removing major cross-functional organizational impediments, has been used to drive internal continuous improvement.
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Organizing Improvements with Lean Leadership at ING Bank
It’s the manager’s job to organize improvements and to make sure that real learnings take place. For real learnings you must accept the unknown and move outside of your knowledge boundary. Agile, lean and continuous delivery help to boost your learning capabilities.
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Continuous Improvement Beyond Retrospectives
If you want continuous improvement you can start with retrospectives, but you must go far beyond that with change management, culture change, and innovation. The most important thing in order to make change happen in organizations is creating new habits and changing your culture.
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Applying Supply Chain Management to Deliver Faster with Higher Quality
Supply chain management can raise the bar with continuous development, argues Joshua Corman, Director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative and co-founder of Rugged Software. Our dependence on IT and software is growing faster than our ability to secure it, and applying supply chain approaches to software development helps to address complexity which reduces risks and increases quality.
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Developing a Solar Car with Scrum
At the Lean Kanban Benelux 2015 conference Jeroen Molenaar shared his experiences working as an agile coach with the Dutch solar car team that has won the world solar challenge in Australia.
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Using Kanban to Innovate
Patrick Steyaert talked about lean innovation with Kanban at the Lean Kanban Benelux 2015 and Lean Kanban Central Europe 2015 conferences. InfoQ interviewed him about the main obstacles to innovation, how to use discovery Kanban to manage innovation, how to develop talent for innovation, and asked him for examples of using Kanban with a business model canvas or lean canvas or other thinking tools.
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Moving Fast at Scale
Jez Humble talked about organizational obstacles to moving fast at scale and how to address them at the GOTO Berlin 2015 conference. InfoQ interviewed him about how we can focus on value, why having a shared understanding of an artifact can be very valuable, removing waste and discovering the needs of customers quickly with low costs, and how to use the concept of improvement kata.