Agile Archives - Lean East

27Oct 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

Maximize the benefits of a huddle meeting

Workers often complain that meetings waste too much of their day. Work time spent in meetings has increased over the past 20 years, and a Harvard Business Review survey found over 70% of senior leaders believe meetings keep them from completing their work. We at Lean East believe that one meeting is more important than others for a team – the team huddle. Our team has worked with many organizations over the years and supported implementing and improving huddles. A well-run huddle is likely the single most effective meeting a leader will have with a team. We will answer eight common questions about huddles to help leaders and teams maximize the benefits. What is the difference between a huddle and a scrum meeting? Let’s begin by clarifying the difference…

28Jul 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

Lean Innovation for Growth

Lesson

Our two previous posts introduced the Need for Lean Innovation and Lean Startup Thinking. In our conversations about Startup Thinking and Innovation, we want to clearly encourage that these innovation tools and strategies work for established companies equally as well as they do for start-ups. In fact, most of the companies Lean East supports are mature companies, not early-stage companies with a nascent product idea to test. In this post we will like to show that there are four primary types of innovation for existing companies, as presented by the Harvard Business Review article "You need an Innovation Strategy," Gary P. Pisano in 2015. The four types are described by whether they feature a business model innovation or technical competency innovation. Then we share three suggestions for existing companies who…

30May 2019 by Steve Musica No Comments

The Need for Lean Innovation

Lesson

As recently as 15-years ago, most markets had few competitors and significant barriers to entry. Management would decide what product to build, budget the work and assign engineers and developers to the project team. New product development projects would often last for many years. Similarly, companies providing services would keep an eye on market competition and take the long-approach for releasing new offerings, often protected from competition by regional control and deep reputation. Today, the internet, open-sourced solutions, and social media have leveled the playing field. Consumers have one-click buying options for new products at their fingertips. New internet-based services disrupt long-standing businesses such as taxi transportation, insurance, legal services and healthcare. Customers will switch quickly and often to better solutions. Every day our world continues to become more complex.…

25Feb 2019 by Raija Suomela No Comments

Lean and Agile – Ideas that Work Together

Lesson

Five similarities between Lean and Agile Readers of our blog will be familiar with Lean fundamentals. Many of you have completed improvement projects or attended workshops such as our ‘Introduction to Lean Thinking’ course. Readers of our blog are past or current clients, or people we have connected with in LinkedIn Groups (we recommend Lean Six Sigma and Operational Excellence as great sources of information and energy). Likewise, many of our readers will know that the goal of Lean is to maximize customer value by minimizing non-value added “waste” in processes. Lean changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services across technologies and departments. But what about Agile? Some members of our community have started to hear whispering of ‘Agile’ in the hallway -…