Agile and Lean Leadership

31.01.2012 - 01.02.2012

Learn to see your organization from new perspectives. Find new ways to create a productive and vital enterprise.

We study common painful patterns in modern product development companies. How have organizations tried to solve them? How can Agile and Lean solve them better?

“Right now, your company has 21st-century Internetenabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.” – Gary Hamel

“Don’t worry about investing in people who might later leave the company. You should worry about what happens if you don’t invest, and people stay.”

“Complex systems will always fail. Failure is the system talking to you. Listen carefully – It’s not noise; it’s information.” – Mary Poppendieck

“If your problem is to limit work to capacity, then adding capacity will not solve your problem.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre group, they’ll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group, they’ll fix it. Or they’ll throw it away and come up with something else.” – Ed Catmull, Pixar

“Some of you guys are so smart you turn what should have been a one year failure into a five year death march.” – Bill Warner

To whom

The course is meant for managers, change agents and leaders in product development organizations, who are

delivering to the customers and/or
transforming the organization.

The participants need to have the basic knowledge of Lean and Agile, and share experiences of their organizations.

Benefits for the participants

After the course you will:

Understand the major principles and methods in Agile and Lean
Understand the new management approach
See your organization with new eyes
Have energy and identity to drive improvement in your organization
Have the first small step of improvement that you can take in your organization tomorrow

Ways of Working

The two day course is built around interactive study of real challenges in real organizations, guided by the interest of the participants. The central Lean and Agile themes are studied and applied to these challenges. The group size is
limited to 14 participants.

Trainer

Ari Tikka is an independent consultant applying Agile, Lean and Organizational dynamics in the real problems of organizations. He has solid experience in leading large scale product development and turbulent organizations. He has led long training programs for program managers and change agents, and coached multi-year programs for creating cultural change.

Brochure

PDF Agile and Lean Leadership

Program

We approach Agile and Lean by studying typical dysfunctions in current organizations, for example overspecialization and coordination chaos:

Overspecialization is a management pattern. A Configuration Engineer is set to manage product configuration problems; a Quality Manager ensures that products are defect-free; an Experience Manager is accountable for the customer experience, and so on. The paradox is that these workers cannot actually do anything on their own in their responsibility area – i.e. the Quality Manager can find but not fix defects – and just by existing they give everyone else a good reason to disregard the problems.

An organization that tries to solve its everyday problems by overspecialization ends up in coordination chaos. Initially project managers are able to coordinate the work, but eventually there will be too many specialized resources and parallel projects and the project managers become overloaded and are blamed for the dysfunctions. Managers feel helpless and frustrated and are pressed to make impulsive and rash decisions. Productivity declines and profits fade.

Coordination chaos leads to the following common symptoms:

Lack of visibility
Lack of dialogue and trust
Lack of learning and competence development
Lack of well-being

How can we do things differently? We approach the Lean and Agile alternative under the following themes:

Creating change at the individual, group and organizational level
Lean product development: pull, flow and cadence, queues, work in progress, waste and value in knowledge creation
Changing the organization by building productive teamwork
Coordination and decision-making
Lean startup: fast feedback, customer collaboration