The Agile Lean Enterprise

Agile was originally developed within the software industry and Lean was originally developed within the manufacturing industry. Given their diverse roots, they are not as different from one another as you might expect. In fact, if you peel back the layers of industry specific terms and perceptions, the two approaches are conceptually identical.
 
Agile and Lean both:

• Maximize value and minimize waste
• Manage time as an asset
• Establish a culture of continuous improvement
• Enable safe failures
• Increase predictability
• Proactively adapt to change
• Strive to achieve measureable results early and often

Traditionally, the difference between the two is that Agile focuses more on enhancing project management, whereas Lean focuses more on enhancing process improvement. However, in an era of almost continuous change the differences between project and process management are blurring.

Given project/process management convergence, rather than choosing between Agile or Lean, the opportunity is to pick the best of both. With the two approaches being conceptually identical, it is relatively easy to merge them to realize their combined strengths.

Agile’s strength is in managing the processes of how teams create customer value. Agile’s lightweight approach to self-organizing teams helps create flexible work cells that require less management overhead, have fewer handoffs, are less specialized, are more modular, and produce a greater diversity of products/services.

Lean’s strength is in managing the processes of how individuals create customer value. Lean’s focus on continuous flow helps to define the next most important thing to be done by each person in a process and provides techniques to ensure the maximum value is created from separate but interdependent resources.

Together Agile and Lean techniques can be applied to manage work environments with a continuously shifting mix of individuals and self-organizing teams. The resulting Agile Lean enterprise can:

1)  Operationalize both the execution and enhancement of a process as one management activity; and

2)  Leverage the best use of individual specialization for explicit linear tasks, and diverse teams for indeterminate non-linear tasks.