Sooner Safer Happier: Antipatterns and Patterns for Business Agility

In Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Daniel Jones and James Womack outline five lean principles:23 Value: specify value from the point of view of the customer. Value Stream: identify the value stream and all the steps in it, from concept to cash. Flow: limit work in progress; stabilize flow; focus on lead time, thro

Software benefits from both an agile and lean approach. The software binary is agile-created and the path to production is lean, as the build, test, deploy process should run repetitively and with a high degree of automation many times a day. Periodically there will be step-change agile experimentation in the path to production and then back into l

In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim defines five ideals of DevOps:24 1.Locality and Simplicity: alleviate dependencies between teams and components. 2.Focus, Flow, and Joy: the smooth flow of work that enables focus and joy. 3.Improvement of Daily Work: continuously improve and pay down technical debt. 4.Psychological Safety: a top predictor of team p

If a pathological or bureaucratic culture is prevalent (see Table 3.1); if the organization or business area is not receptive to upheaval; if there have been failed capital “T” Transformation attempts; if there is little psychological safety; if there is fear; if there are strong vested interests in maintaining the status quo; or if the locus of co

Organizations reporting the fewest incidents showed the most devastating accidents. The Deepwater Horizon story is one such example: the drilling rig had a “perfect” safety record for several years until the day of the explosion. When honesty and openness are replaced by fear of reprisal, bad news is buried, problems are hidden, risks go unreported

It is advisable to have a central Ways of Working Center of Enablement (WoW CoE) and coaching. (Note that it’s called a “Center of Enablement,” not a “Center of Excellence.”) The WoW CoE is a central, small, servant leadership function for ways of working. The servant part is that it is there to support colleagues, to help mobilize the organization

Like the tide going down, limiting WIP exposes the rocks that have been there all along, hidden in long lead times. Limiting WIP is an “enabling constraint,” surfacing pain points. Glossing over the blockers to flow, going around them, or leaving work waiting will not lead to better end-to-end business—outcomes. It will only leave inefficiencies in

To quote Martin Fowler, one of the Agile Manifesto signatories, “Imposing agile methods introduces a conflict with the values and principles that underlie agile methods.”

Software benefits from both an agile and lean approach. The software binary is agile-created and the path to production is lean, as the build, test, deploy process should run repetitively and with a high degree of automation many times a day. Periodically there will be step-change agile experimentation in the path to production and then back into l