Lean, Agile vs Design

Thinking
Principles over process. -Jeff Gothelf

Jorge Eduardo Méndez Martínez

00329296
Strategic Business Management
Mario Villalón (MBA)
Universidad Anáhuac Qro
Intro

When a business is trying to

incorporate work philosophies like
lean, agile and design thinking, two
things happens: by integrating 3
different work methodologies, with
separate rythms and languages
they don’t mix well, and the
outcome is often bad planning and
execution of the processes,
specially at a large scale business.
So when facing challenges, it is
common to try to fix it focusing on the velocity of the process, and it’s overall
productivity, spending a lot of effort seeking to maximize efficiency by the already
stated plan whom will not change easily.
¿Why does these methodologies seem to break at large scale?

Summary

Agile
The main principle of agile is to respond rapidly to change over following a plan. As a
business starts to operate, it is important to pay attention to user’s feedback, as we
can’t predict how the market conditions will look one or five years later. By looking
strategically for insights directly from the user, it allows us to get a glimpse of what is
the next feature that should be incorporated into the product, and how the day to day
processes should look.
Nowadays the vast majority of companies tend to focus on a strict guideline that will
tell them how to get more features as fast as possible, without delaying in the actual
validation of these.
All the available tools out there, should be used as they were meant to. To get feedback
from the user as fast as possible without having utterly defined objectives that will only
get in the way of seeing what is what the user really wants.
Lean
Lean is about looking for clues within the market that will tell us how to gain market
share, what is the competition doing and how we can counter them, when should be
the right moment, and to ultimetaly have a plan that will tell us undoubtly what to
develop and how to merchandise it, according to research.
On a lean-based business philosophy it’s important to work in small batches, once we
know how the product will be developed, it should only be produced at first shortly,
by doing this, the feedback will be more often and the engineers and technicians whom
are closest to the product will have more room to adjust their work process.

Design thinking

Design thinking is a human-

centered approach to get
insights of that are the user’s
needs, the possibilities within
the business operations and
the possible strategies to
counterattack business
challenges.

It helps us to develop empathy with the target user, and ultimetaly build a more creative
and innovative solution framework.

PRINCIPLES

#1 Customer value= business value.

To achieve a better product is to get a better understanding of the customer. By having

a user-centered perspective, seeking to make them succesful, help them achieve their
goals and paying attention at how does their life looks like, the features of the
product/service and process priorities will adjust to what they perceive as value.
*Outcome: a measurable change in customer behavior.
#2 Work in short cycles.
Working in short cycles will allow the team to learn more quickly on what is working
and what’s not and to take evidence-based decisions, one by one, while taking less risk
it’s also easier to change course without making long-term financial investments.
*Questions to ask before next cycle:
¿What’s the next most important thing we need to learn?
¿What is the least amount of work we need to do to learn that?

#3 Hold regular retrospectives.

At the end of each cycle or in between, get together to conversate about what worked
and what didn’t and how did the team felt during the development, this will help
improve the product and the process.

#4 Go and see.
Walking around the work environment and getting to see what are some of the best
patterns at each department and amplify them within the organization.

#5 Test high-risk hypothesis.

Testing the hypothesis that would cost more to learn by doing cheaper experiments.
*Hypothesis statement:

We believe this
[outcome] will be achieved
if [these users] succesfully
[attain this user benefit] with
[this solution feature].
#6 Do less more often.
Finding better focused experiments to gain valuable insights with less efort.

#7 Work as a balanced team.

There are many modern
staffing models, that are
built to have a cross-
functional work flow and
integrate communication
within the team and
development processes.
Small teams can be more
agile and rapid, due to
better transparency and
integrated understanding
of what are they doing. By
having a small autonomus and empowered team whom’s able to make day to day
tactical decisions, agility will be improved.

#8 Radical transparency
What are we workin on? what are our reasons? how are we going to deliver this
feature?
What success looks like?
Having regular scheduled meetings to show the progress and to engage with every
person with the team will make them actively interested in delivering value to the
customer.
Having access to customers will help to determinate what is the minimum viable
product, as the product develops, the customer will give his feedback and ultimately
what’s desired.
Access to data is crucial for members of the team in order to have a better
understanding on what is the impact of their work, and in what direction the bussiness
is moving.
#9 Review incentives and performance management.
Having a clear perspective of what are you asked to do at work is key to achieve great
team spirit, and personal development on the team. If the incentives are focused to
productive output, the members of the team are going to do just that. Instead
incentivise interest on the problematic to solve, and the flow will shift to having better
ideas and working smarter.

#10 Make learning a first class citizen of your backlog.

Priotize learning process over work process by tracking the learning data in the backlog
just as sales or productivity data, building a visual timescale that measures the progress
and evolution of the product consent by the user’s needs.

Conclusion
If seeking to improve processes and their outcomes, integrating principles over
processes at the core nature of the business, will prepare the company for rapid
changes of the market and user’s needs. Coming from this it is easier to integrate
different tools from separate methodologies on a business process framework.
References
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4VPfmtwRac