Trust our engineering teams to devise operational protocols that increase efficiency, communication and quality. The Agile movement, originally formed by software engineers as a response to traditional sequential "waterfall" methodologies, is now a global norm for tech teams, and is being coopted by many others. Agile emphasises adaptability, and rapid iterative repetition of the build-measure-learn loop, to release working products quickly and adjust as you go.
The concept of "agile" has evolved into a broadly applicable range of frameworks and behaviours, for the managers of any organisation or process that wish to move quickly, learn from doing, and generate minimal baggage along the way.
Leading Agile frameworks include:
Today, "lean" can mean a lot of things. It's probably more an aspiration for most organisations than an attained state that they can credibly back with evidence. There are established Lean practices that take many forms, in manufacturing, software, and so on, but ultimately Lean is a mindset and the behaviours that result from it.
The principles of Lean thinking form the genesis of what is now a worldwide industrial movement. They were originally developed by US & UK researchers in the 50s, based on Toyota's internal practices (The Toyota Way) from the 1930s. The basic idea is to deliver more value while making less waste. Today, the Lean philosophy manifests most prominently in tech, startups and business improvement. Everyone wants to do lean.
Fast forward to the 2011 book by Eric Reis, The Lean Startup, which today is still essential reading for entrepreneurs in the startup world, and instructive for other kinds of product or organisational management. The book popularised a handful of now standard concepts, most notably the the minimum viable product (MVP).
Lean and Agile are closely related to each other...
Both share a similar set of foundational objectives: to deliver value efficiently for a customer; discover better ways of working to continuously learn and improve; transparently connect strategy and goals to give teams meaningful purpose; and enable people to contribute and lead to their fullest potential.
– From Lean management or agile? The right answer may be both, by McKinsey & Company.
Lean and Agile overlap so much they are often confused. Does it matter? Probably not. What matters is finding the best, custom structure for your needs. And the best way to to do that is apply Lean and/or Agile practice! Test new methods in realistic environments quickly, learn, then iterate and go again.
<aside> ⭐ Forge Your Own Way: Basecamp
The company has developed and published its own process that eschews the importing of formal structures from elsewhere. The company's founder Jason Fried explains that they're:
Not into waterfall or agile or scrum. [... They] don’t do daily stand ups, design sprints, development sprints, or anything remotely tied to a metaphor that includes being tired and worn out at the end. No backlogs, no Kanban, no velocity tracking, none of that.
The Basecamp process includes:
→ Working in six-week cycles (i.e. rather than one- or two-weekly sprints). → "Shaping" work packages to prepare them for the team, and basing resource estimates on the company's "appetite" for how much they think it's worth. → They "give full responsibility to a small integrated team of designers and programmers". → And they emphasise the process of targeting one specific risk in the product development process: "the risk of not shipping on time".
📕 Read: Shape Up // Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
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