Question #2

2. For some companies, there will be resistance to SCRUM. How close is it to lean project management?

Lean Project Management is a separate approach. Clearly Lean and Scrum are related, Lean has been adapted fairly successfully to SW by Mary Poppendieck (see attached), and though there is a fairly active consulting practice based around it, the methodology has not taken off as Scrum or Agile has, due to the fact that it is more complex to implement and requires more rigor and insight to initiate in any organization. The seven principles of Lean can be simply associated to both System Development (no surprise) and software development (with more abstraction). They are:

• Eliminate Waste
• Amplify Learning
• Decide as late as possible
• Deliver as fast as possible
• Empower the team
• Build integrity in
• See the whole

From their titles, their association to Agile is easy to see; however, once you start trying to create the actual linkages, abstraction really becomes your friend. I like Lean a lot. Mary and I have had many a conversation on how Theory of Constraints ties in with Lean – I think both of us have enlightened the other and though Agile seems to have become the vernacular, TOC and Lean I think are far more powerful in producing substantive improvements to the value chain. Where I have been striving for the past several years is an integrated methodology that combines all three so that the resultant approach is simple to understand, intuitive to execute, and productive as all get out!

As an aside, Capital One initiated their transformation with a desire to reduce time to market of their projects and started with Lean as a methodological framework within which they used Agile and Scrum practices as the implemented procedures