Tapping the Source: The Lean Principles Behind Agile Methods

When applying agile practices, organizations often have problems because they do not fully comprehend the underlying lean principles. Simply going through the motions of daily standups, sprints, and retrospectives may not be enough to build an adaptive, high performance organization. Join Sanjiv Augustine and Roland Cuellar to learn the lean foundation of agile practices and how to apply them when faced with organizational obstacles to agile methods. Explore how understanding lean principles-including Work-in-Process (WIP) limits, takt or cycle time, and heijunka or production leveling-can be helpful in overcoming challenges to agile at the team, program, and enterprise levels. Armed with these principles, you will be better prepared to customize agile to the particular challenges of your organization, recognize when rote execution of common practices is counterproductive, and understand how to use the lean principles to look upstream in the software development process and downstream toward production for your next set of substantial organizational improvements.