Lean and innovation
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Lawell Kiing gave a talk on lean and innovation. He discussed how lean principles like cross-functional teams, small batches, and eliminating waste can enable faster innovation at lower costs. However, lean alone does not guarantee innovation - other factors like priorities, leadership, culture and adapting to change are also needed. While lean removes barriers, companies must avoid using it just as a replacement process and instead foster an environment where diverse ideas can be tested and learning amplified. The overall goal of lean as it relates to innovation is to deliver value to customers as quickly as possible.
Lean and innovation
- 1. UBC Alumni Lecture Lean and Innovation Lawell Kiing Senior Director, Engineering
- 4. Innovation Product and/or service that delivers a significant increase in the “pleasure” of an existing process/product/service. Pleasure can be measured as in efficiency, costs (economics) and/or user experience
- 5. LEAN and Innovation – Match?
- 6. Innovation Inhibitors Managing chaos Uncertainty Silos and homogeneity Speed and cost of innovation Customer wants Idea to implementation to results
- 7. Managing Chaos Let Chaos Reign Structured Process ● Hard to start ● Rigid ● Lack of focus ● Another project ● Hard to sell ● Too much expectation ● Easy to give up ● Too focused ● No structure ● Hard to attract
- 8. Silos and homogeneity Silos Homogeneity •Development teams vs. •Same profession yields test teams vs. doc same ideas teams, etc… •Not open to outside point •Hand offs, like an of views assembly line •Does not understand the •Only understand one part whole of the assembly •Same work leads to same •Idling, wastes, handoffs, d concepts ependencies and bottlenecks
- 9. LEAN Cross Functional Team Cross Functionality Overall Team Skills ● Reduces handover ● Employs a diversity of ideas ● Fosters common end-to-end understanding ● Increases flexibility of individuals and teams ● Removes dependencies & bottlenecks ● Reduces work in progress ● Avoids idling specialists Favoring Generalizing Specialists ● One or more fields of expertise Me today Me in 2 years Me in 5 years ● General knowledge of software development ● General knowledge of business domain ● Actively seeking to gain new skills © SAP 2010 / Page 9
- 12. LEAN Speed and Cost •LEAN principles: deliver value as fast as possible, eliminate waste •Small batches in size and fixed length of time •Practically, sprints are no more than 4 weeks, can even go 1 week •Costs are incremental and iterative, unnecessary wastes such as bottlenecks and handoffs are minimized
- 14. LEAN Dealing with Unknown ADAPTABILITY MEASUREMENTS AMPLIFIED LEARNING
- 15. Customers •Concept of value is core to LEAN •Value is from the point of view of the customer/user •Value stream mapping is the concept of mapping where value is delivered to the customer and eliminate those areas that don’t •Key is the concept of the prioritized backlog and demo to the customer •Getting customers and users feedback are often the forgotten step •LEAN forces the understanding of the customer and users to be a core value and requirement
- 16. Idea to Implementation to Results
- 17. My Experience - Innovation Week Create outstanding innovation for <project> – Innovation needs to be very visible for the end-user and easy to use – Innovation needs to be easy to understand and explain – Need to knock the socks off the customer and end-users Innovation Pilot – Pilot for other innovation weeks – Pilot for other innovation initiatives in engineering Create excitement – Inspiring and challenging – Forming new disparate teams, unlocking potential through diversity – Empowering for everyone © SAP 2007 / Page 17
- 18. Format of Innovation Week Friday September 12th: Innovation training day provided by Roger Garriock of DICor (8:30am to 4:30pm) Monday September 15th: Kickoff day, speakers to provide background, context and even customer pain points to help focus the exercise. Speakers from PDM, pre-sales, customer support and PgMs. Tues/Wed September 16th and 17th: cross-functional teams (i.e. form from people from all walks including dev, QA, arch, Ux, etc…) form and brainstorm and come up with an innovation idea/pitch for Pioneer Thursday afternoon: each team to pitch their idea to a “board” (myself and a few others TBD) Friday: Innovation sprint candidates announced © SAP 2007 / Page 18
- 19. Rules Teams will be assigned and should be diverse, which means: Cross-roles Cross-teams Cross-profiles Visible product innovation ONLY Not process improvements Not internal plumbing innovation Must be applicable to <project> © SAP 2007 / Page 19
- 20. “It's not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
- 21. Final Thoughts •Important to remember that LEAN ≠ Innovation •There are many other factors to innovation •Things such as priorities, leadership, investments, culture, environment, etc… •What I want to show is that LEAN is not an inhibitor to innovation, but that its principles are in fact enablers •But you still need the other factors to succeed… •Many companies implement LEAN/Agile as a process replacement, this will not foster innovation just as the old process did not foster innovation •There are not many rules to LEAN. But if you break the core rules/principles, the whole thing falls apart. •Now, go do it and see for yourself (go gemba)
- 22. A day without laughter is a day wasted. Charlie Chaplin
- 23. Thank You Lawell Kiing Senior Director Engineering SAP Canada Lawell.kiing@sap.com