Culture is important but it’s a reflection of decision & reward policies in a company. To be able to change it you must change the way decisions are made and rewarded.
Here are three foundations of Lean are:
- Take a systems-thinking point of view & recognize the system causes most of your problems
- Respect and trust people
- Management (via servant leadership) improves the system within which people work so that they can work autonomously on a well stated objective
The challenge with software is that it is not visible while it is being built. The greatest diff between Kanban and Scrum is Kanban’s insistence on explicit workflow which adds to Scrum’s visibility of the work in process
An Agile product management tool’s primary purpose is to create visibility of both workflow and of artifacts (epics->stories). One doesn’t follow a tool, rather this visibility reflects what people are doing. If one understands lean-flow, the tool assists people in making good decisions
Good frameworks are merely proxies for good Lean-thinking. Tools designed around frameworks miss the opportunity to teach Lean-thinking. Frameworks can be good “tools” in the sense they give a good starting point – but you should outgrow them. A good tool will always be useful
Al Shalloway