Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

However, we should not be optimizing for the rate at which we declare things “done” in isolation on a branch. We should optimize for the overall lead time — the time it takes us to deliver valuable software to users. Optimizing for “dev complete” time is precisely what causes “integration hell.” A painful and unpredictable “last mile” of integratio

There are a number of canvas created by others that focus on product development, as shown in Table 4-1. Table 4-1. Visual ideation canvases Name Purpose The Lean Canvasa Makes the assumption that product/market fit is the riskiest hypothesis that must be tested. The Opportunity Canvasb Focuses discussions about what we’re building and why, then he

The Kanban Method follows four principles of continuous improvement designed to minimize resistance to change: Start with what you do now Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities, and job titles Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

better approach is to set high-level long-term goals, carefully manage the more predictable near future, and constantly adjust our shorter-range plans to get closer to our targets. We can adopt this approach by implementing strategy deployment described in Chapter 15. Strategy deployment takes the Improvement Kata meta-method presented in Chapter 6

To create a value chain map, take a product and put it in the appropriate position at the top of a new diagram. Then map the services it depends on and the connections between them. This exercise can be performed quickly and cheaply on a whiteboard using sticky notes.16 Figure 14-3. Value chain map, courtesy of Simon Wardley The next step is to cre

The key to the Principle of Mission is to create alignment and enable autonomy by setting out clear, high-level target conditions with an agreed time frame — which gets smaller under conditions of greater uncertainty — and then leaving the details of how to achieve the conditions to teams.

Finally, value stream mapping reveals the folly of local optimizations. In almost every case we have seen, making one process block more efficient will have a minimal effect on the overall value stream. Since rework and wait times are some of the biggest contributors to overall delivery time, adopting “agile” processes within a single function (suc

Questions for readers: How do your product teams view your current GRC processes? To what extent is your organization engaged in risk management theater? What actions do leaders take to develop a shared understanding of GRC language and frameworks throughout the organization? Do your GRC structures (policies, organization, and processes) prevent pr

Based on experiments at Microsoft, 1/3 of ideas created a statistically significant positive change, 1/3 produced no statistically significant difference, and 1/3 created a statistically significant negative change.12 All of the ideas tested were thought to be good ones — but neither intuition nor expert opinion are good gauges of the value our ide