Pages

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Lean thinking next wave, are we really ready for it ?

I have been traveling from the last couple of days attending conference, meeting up with customers ,agile gurus, would-be agile managers. From this travel, what I see is that ,lean thinking is kind of catching up peoples' attention. Everybody talks about Muda("waste" in Japnese), they talk about Andan systems, etc. Are we really ready to bring lean into organization ? . If you ask me, No we are not. As per the statistics, barely 10% of the software organizations are practicing agile. I think if you have not mastered the art of agility, then moving directly to lean practices from traditional development would not only be difficult but might not succeed. Ask me why ? Lean thinking provides set of principles and values. Practices needs to be derived based on these fundamental principles and values. The team practicing waterfall model,has no clue about how to derive the practices. But an agile team has some clue about the practices that could reduce the waste. For ex: TDD, Refactoring,etc. This leads me to conclude that the team practicing agile methods have greater chances of implementing lean practices rather than the traditional development teams.

1 comment:

Narayana.D said...

Good article, gives an insight inot how lean thinking can be implemented.