Lean Enterprise

By Leonardo Murillo

- 7 minutes read - 1312 words

Technology executives: it is possible to truly transform your enterprise’s ability to deliver technology!

This insight is the bottom line message I got from reading Lean Enterprise, but it will not happen without a lot of effort.

If you are reading this post, I’m guessing you are a technology leader or engineer working with some enterprise organization, looking for ways to enhance your ability to innovate and deliver technology.

Read on to get a quick overview of some of the insights you’ll find in Lean Enterprise.

The yet to be fulfilled promise of true enterprise transformation

I work with large enterprises day in and day out.

As a cloud solutions architect and engineering leader RFP, MSA and SOW are ever present components of the engagements in which I participate regularly; together with working with competing vendors, and with the client’s globally dispersed and culturally heterogeneous teams.

I must admit, there’s frustration in many of those experiences, a usual aftertaste of a broken system - processes and structures that do not enable true innovation nor engineering quality, that inhibit the growth of companies and the teams that make them run.

The promise of true transformation still eludes many, many enterprises, and the catch phrases of DevOps, Agile and Lean, now present in some shape or form in everybody´s discourse, seem to get frequently transformed into convenient shapes that don’t quite live up to their audacious goal, but that do check a box in the strategy of the IT organization.

This may sound harsh, nevertheless, you can count on it being honest - and I think honesty is the first step. Self awareness is key to enlightenment.

But what about all those surveys!

Yes I know this opinion, in the year 2020, might be controversial… I mean, “look at the following benchmark and industry survey” right? Didn’t I read somewhere that agile is the new norm and that most respondents have adopted DevOps?

From my perspective, those numbers are dramatically skewed by interpretation, dig deep, and you will see that those adopters have a partial understanding of the all-encompassing paradigm shift that is a truly agile enterprise and are not fully supported by their organization, they have not reached their real potential.

They may be doing some form of CI/CD and very likely using the cloud, they’re doing standups and have nice Jira boards; but the way the organization budgets, how investment is focused and assigned, how technology projects are executed and evaluated; and the structures that drive strategy, enable experimentation and promote collaboration, they all have a long way to go.

There are ways to truly transform. Your potential to build technology can be materialized.

In Lean Enterprise the authors narrate, with uncanny resemblance to field stories of my own, scenarios that resonate with those very situations I mentioned.

Although five years have passed since its first edition, a lot of the foundational problems that lean and agile look to solve are still deep-rooted in most enterprises I encounter.

The good thing is Lean Enterprise shows you that paths forward exist (Lean being one of them)!

There are ways to truly transform and enable creativity, ingenuity and innovation to flourish in the enterprise. And who wouldn’t want that?

Imagine if the ability to revolutionize and disrupt of startups scrambling for funding could be achieved by billion dollar companies - how much faster could society advance?

The book gives you a high level set of possible directions

But do not expect to read Lean Enterprise and have a clear checklist of items to go over, that once completed, will mean you’ve reached transformation nirvana.

The book touches on a large body of very relevant topics and strategies but keeps at the very surface of those highly intricate subjects. This will be definitely a stepping stone for the reader, but the real homework will lie ahead.

You’ve gotten this far, so let me give you a bit of a head start.

You are excited now, right! Those frustrating experiences that have limited your ability to deliver innovation and that have inhibited your teams’ full potential from being released may be coming to an end!

Since you’ve read all the way through here, I will give you the three more relevant takeaways I got from reading the book, plus a huge laundry list of reading material and reference information to move into action.

Remember, this is just a high level overview, the work ahead will be long and arduous.

  • There is hope. It is not utopia, enterprises can and have transformed integrally and have enabled true innovation, not just technically but also in the ways they engage their partners, vendors and teams, and the way they approach their finances and product horizons.

  • There is knowledge. You are not alone in this endeavour and there are huge amounts of acquired expertise, theories and success and failure stories from others that have walked a very similar path as the one you are likely on.

  • Real change is integral, and C level championship is indispensable. Transformation is not a technical exercise, its an integral business effort that is empowered by technology as a constructive tool, but it would work just as well if you were using it for handcrafts. True transformation involves executive strategy, finances, project management, recruitment and talent management, and basically every aspect of the operation of an enterprise. The higher up you can get in the decision-making organization, the better your changes of truly achieving your audacious objectives.

Now, time to learn, experiment and adapt

You read it already, this book is just a high level overview, you now have a considerable homework ahead. So here’s some followup reading material and concepts you will want to explore after reading this book, including some reference links I’ve gotten on my own research:

Concepts and terminology

You will want to do research on all of the following,they deal with everything from leadership and mission to product development and technology, as I mentioned, transformation is a wide ranging exercise.

  • Mission Command
  • Principle of Mission
  • The OODA Loop
  • Gamestorming
  • The Business Model Canvas
  • The Problem Statement Canvas
  • The One Metric That Matters
  • A3 Thinking
  • Innovation Accounting
  • Pirate Metrics
  • User Story Mapping
  • Continuous Integration
  • Continuous Delivery
  • The Three Horizons of Product Development
  • Value Stream Mapping
  • Cost of Delay
  • CD3 Method
  • Urgency Profiles
  • Test Automation
  • Deployment Pipelines
  • Impact Mapping
  • Improvement Kata
  • Principle of Subsidiarity
  • Value Chain Map

Books

Get started and share your insights

So get started, try and adapt, none of these strategies are flawless and you will find both positive and negative aspects to all of them.

Enabling innovation is an act of creative innovation in itself. Use all these concepts as references and tools, not as deterministic solutions.

Finally, please share your progress and what you learn through the process, comment and share this post and if you want to stay informed of what myself and others have learned, join my mailing list!

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