the four pillars of lean enterprise execution
TRANSCRIPT
The Four Pillars of Lean Enterprise Execution
Marco Tedone John Ferguson Smart
Marco TedoneGlobal Head of Lean Enterprise Transformation,
HSBC Global Standards
marcotedone [email protected]
Consultant, trainer, mentor, author, developer
John Ferguson Smart“I help teams of smart people
learn to work together more efficiently, to deliver better software faster”
wakaleo [email protected]
Consultant, trainer, mentor, author, developer
Europe, 37000 BC
The first part of our talk takes use back around 40,000 years, in the middle of the last Ice Age.
This is Wilma, one of our closest extinct human relatives, who lived in Europe around 43000 years ago.
For more than 200000 years, Homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthals, like Wilma dominated Eurasia. They lived everywhere from Britain and Europe to the middle east and Uzbekistan, between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. They were not brutish cavemen; their brains where as large as ours or larger, and like us, they used tools, took care of their sick, buried their dead, and had mastered fire.
Neanderthals were marvellously well adapted to live in Ice-age Europe. They were strong and robust, and used to the cold climate. And they were very good at hunting large Ice Age animals.
Horses, Chauvet Cave, 30000 BC
But by around 40000 years age, Neanderthals had disappeared. There are many theories as to why, but most anthropologists agree that they failed to adapt to changing environment, and were out-competed by the homo sapiens of the Aurignacian culture. The folk who drew these paintings, some of the oldest in the world. They also carved small statues and figurines, and even some of the the first musical instruments, including some wonderful bone flutes.
These newcomers didn’t just invent art, engraving and music. They also brought more sophisticated tools, not just of stone, but also new fangled devices made of bone and antler, and more sophisticated hunting tools like spear throwers and bows. And their highly developed trade routes made it easier for them to cope with climate change when their preferred foods were not available.
And though there is evidence of Neanderthals adopting some of this hardware, by around 39000 BC, the last Neanderthals had retreated to the southern tip of Spain, before disappearing entirely.
A time of disruption
- Like the Neanderthals towards the end of the last Ice Age, we live in a time of disruption. But change now happens in months and years, not in centuries and millennia.
- In an environment of disruption, the only way to survive is to have extreme adaptability. To be able to react to changing circumstances faster than the competition. To be able to experiment.
- The only certainty is that what works today will not work tomorrow. Old business models will fail. Old leadership styles will become unacceptable. Slow-moving businesses that fail to adapt will become extinct.
"The successful players will be the ones with the greatest agility, creativity and foresight”
- Matt Church
Hunters with bows, 25000 BC
Modern humans survived the ice age not because they were stronger or tougher, but because they were more adaptable and creative.
Organisations are in a similar situation today. In his book "Next: Thriving in the Decade of Disruption", Australian speaker and thought leader Matt Church says "The successful players will be the ones with the greatest agility, creativity and foresight”.
- The world is complex, in the cynefin sense - it is hard to predict how the market will react to an idea, but once you see the reaction, you can draw your conclusions.
- The bottom line is, to succeed in todays environment, organisations need to become radically better at what they do, or fall by the wayside.
- Not marginally better. Not incrementally better. But differentially better.
In this talk, we will look at ways that some organisations are learning to become differentially better.
Great teams harness three things
Innovation
Agility
Technology
- Things move a lot faster today than they did in the Ice Ages. Evolution in a number of areas means that we have to keep pace with a much faster rate of change than even a decade ago.
- Organisations that succeed today do so because they manage to harness three different but related areas:- Innovation- Agility - Technology
Great teams harness three things
Innovation
Agility
Technology
- Peter Drucker once said, “Every organisation must prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.”- Great teams innovate. But they don’t just innovate their products and solutions; Some of the biggest industry innovations, in companies like Amazon and NetFlix, come through
innovating not their products, but their business model.- Innovation can be incremental or radical. Incremental innovation, such as small improvements to your product line, is less scary. For example, a decade ago, making a higher quality CD
player would be an easy incremental innovation.- Radical innovation is harder, more expensive, and more risky. It takes much more courage. But radical innovation eats incremental innovation for breakfast. Think music streaming for
CD players.
Great teams harness three things
Innovation
Agility
Technology
- But innovation doesn't work well in a void. It needs focus. It needs to know not only what needs to be done, but why.- Great teams not only innovate, but they innovate to find solutions that are more relevant to their customer needs. They try to understand their customer needs. - Great organisations are agile. But agility is not about processes or certifications. It is about company values. Values of feedback, collaboration and communication.
Values that support a deeper understanding and empathy of client needs, and inspire the team to seek out solutions that are both relevant and innovative.
Great teams harness three things
Innovation
Agility
Technology
- Both Innovation and Agility are great, but in today’s context, a quick turnaround is of the essence. - Great teams embrace technology as a way to support both their innovation and their agility.- Great teams use Agility to understand what to build, and why to build it.- But their ideas are really only educated guesses until they see how the end user reacts.- Technology is always just a means to an end, but when used well, it can create a huge significant advantage. Great teams know how to use technology to get faster
feedback about how well their innovations actually do help the end user, or produce value for the organisation, and to get solutions producing value into production faster and more often.
Lean Enterprise is the organisation of an enterprise that allows the business to continuously learn new and better ways to deliver value by validating hypotheses using a rigorous scientific approach.
Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly have captured many of the essential ideas on how some high performing organisations achieve these goals in a book called “Lean Enterprise.
Lean Enterprise is the organisation of an enterprise that allows the business to continuously learn new and better ways to deliver value by validating hypotheses using a rigorous scientific approach.
What does the scientific approach look like
The scientific method consists of the following steps:
- Understand the direction or challenge- Grasp the current condition- Define the next target condition- Iterate toward the Target Condition through a series of incremental experiments
Experiments result in either measurements or discoveries
“If the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.” ~ Enrico Fermi
An experiment should test an hypothesis which resides outside our Threshold of Knowledge (TOK). The learning deriving from the observation of what actually happened compared to what we were expecting is what allows us to expand our TOK and therefore move toward the Next Target Condition
The scientific method in a Lean Enterprise
The business has got an hypothesis on how to generate value
Technology and the Business collaborate to define and deliver a minimal implementation of that idea as quickly as possible
The value delivered by that idea is measured against the hypothesis and the product is adjusted accordingly
Plan -> Do -> Check -> Act (PDCA)
In a Lean Enterprise, the scientific method and experimentation follow this flow:
- The business has an hypothesis on how to generate some value- Technology builds the Minimum Viable Implementation of that hypothesis, just to allow the business to measure its outcomes- Business and Technology measure the actual value delivered by that MVI and either: adjust the MVI based on feedback; can the idea as it didn’t produce
any value or pivot that idea into another MVI
Budget Management
Regulatory and
Security
Operations and Monitoring
Software Delivery
Portfolio Management
Procurement and Legal
There are many components to a Lean Enterprise…
Today we want to talk about the four pillars that allows Technology Execution in a Lean Enterprise
DevOpsTest AutomationBDDAgility
Four Pillars
We find that organisations that adopt Lean Enterprise principles successfully, get things right in four key areas. We call these the Four Pillars of Lean Enterprise Technology Execution.
Agility
- Agility is the ability to adapt to changing conditions as a result of learning new and better ways to do things- Today, teams do Agile. They go on 2 day training courses and become Masters of Agile. They do heavy upfront requirements analysis and package the
requirements as “stories”. The original intent of the working group who wrote the Agile Manifesto was to bring business and IT closer. Scrum worsened all of that with artefacts such as the Scrum Master certification
- Agile is none of these things.
BDD
You may have heard of Behaviour Driven Development.- BDD is not test automation, Cucumber etc.- BDD is what gives Agile teeth. - Traditional requirements, and most requirements expressed as “user stories”, which describe HOW a system should work are not good requirements- Successful Agile teams focus not on HOW, but on WHAT a system should do.- BDD goes further. BDD gives teams a way to understand not just the WHAT, but also the WHY.- The Why leads to the WHAT-IF
DevOps
DevOps is an operating model that aims at delivering valuable software in the customers hands in the shortest possible time with the highest possible quality by automating everything that can be automated and by removing cultural and practical barriers.
DevOps is not a methodology or a tool or a framework. It’s the road that is used to ship value to production. It’s also just one of the components of a Lean Enterprise.
Test Automation is like any other tool. It’s either a benefit or a hazard.
Test Automation
The Deckard Principle
Test Automation follows the Dekard Principle. It can have a huge benefit on the project, providing fast feedback and a safety net that lets you get things into production quickly and with less risk as well as a design tool.
Or it can be a drain on project resources, reduce confidence in the build and deployment process.
The choice largely depends on how much value you place on the quality of your test automation efforts.
There is no alternative to choosing quality over speed. Quality will make teams faster. Speed without quality will introduce technical debt and slow teams down in the medium to long term
BDD Discovery and Opportunity
Agility Effective Teams
Test Automation
Faster Feedback
DevOps Delivery at Speed
Deliver value sooner
Deliver quality at speed
Adapt with confidence
Dis
cove
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ue effe
ctiv
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BDD Discovery and Opportunity
These four areas support and reenforce each other…
Two keystones Skill
Focus
Skill without focus is wasted
Focus without skill is ineffectual
Skill is essential- Great teams know that learning is not a one-off thing, but that is a continuous process. Successful teams encourage Deliberate Discovery and
Deliberate Practice, such as coding dojos, prototypes or even brown-bag sessions, to discover what they don’t know and hone what they do. Successful teams love their craft, and aim to excel.
- Unfocused skill is wasteful. Slack is important, but so is a common vision and a shared understanding- Unskilled focus is ineffectual - work will be slow and inefficient, and costly in the long term. It is much harder to experiment if it takes 3 months to get
a working prototype.
Agility BDD Test Automation DevOps
SkillFocus
Successful Lean Enterprise Delivery
Questions?Marco Tedone John Ferguson Smart