Part 1 of this book introduces the contemporary business landscape that requires the attention of all companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. Our global economy is undergoing rapid and disruptive change driven by digital technologies and digitally enhanced products. This section briefly introduces the concepts behind Lean, Agile, and VSM practices in a digital context.

Understanding the digital economy’s landscape

The concept of the digital economy is more than just a trend. It’s a new business paradigm. The term digital economy came into use in the 1990s and was the subject of Don Tapscott’s 1995 book, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence.1 As digital computing technologies and the internet have evolved, they’ve significantly transformed how businesses operate, particularly in eBusiness and eCommerce. Today, the lines between digital and traditional economies...

The goal of Lean is to maximize customer value, quality, and efficiency by minimizing waste and non-value-adding costs while optimizing delivery speed and throughput. The elimination of waste is the hallmark of Lean principles, as depicted in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 – Classic eight wastes of Lean

The essence of Lean is simple: organizations should refrain from investing in endeavors that produce excess work, features, or capabilities that customers neither desire nor find valuable. Failing to do so might drive external or internal customers to seek alternative products or services. The complexity lies in determining what customers need and the level of quality they anticipate while eliminating any elements that fail to align with their objectives. Lean practitioners refer to these excesses as waste.

A Lean enterprise’s imperative is continuously maximizing customer value at the lowest possible cost...

While Lean principles focus on enhancing efficiency and productivity, Agile practices serve as an effective approach to develop new solutions and address business challenges. Agile prioritizes enhancing business agility, enabling organizations to embrace changes to retain value and competitiveness.

Agile introduces methods and tools that facilitate proactive change, foster creativity, and promote innovation, allowing you to tackle complex problems. Unlike Lean’s continuous flow philosophy, Agile advocates an iterative and incremental timeboxed approach empowering teams to create new value in rapid development cycles that align work with customers’ evolving needs and the dynamic business landscape.

This book provides actionable insights into how Agile’s iterative development and incremental delivery mindset can accelerate problem-solving and innovation, benefiting your professional career by honing essential skills. Let’...

As you explore the intricacies of Lean and Agile in this book, you’ll come to appreciate that each methodology brings a distinct set of principles, practices, and advantages to the table. Across industries, Lean’s strength lies in its ability to reduce waste and optimize processes. Conversely, Agile applies an iterative development and incremental delivery process that emphasizes adaptability, flexibility, and customer-centricity.

But here’s where it becomes interesting. The true magic unfolds when you bring these two approaches together, as described in the next section.

Living in a Lean-Agile house

So far, we have explored Lean and Agile principles and practices in isolation. Now, it’s time to bring them together. To do that, we need to grasp the characteristics that define a Lean-Agile enterprise.

To kick off our introduction, we’ll explore our House of Lean-Agile, as depicted in Figure 1.3. This figure depicts...

In this section, we’ll briefly introduce the concepts behind VSM, a Lean-oriented practice that stands as a cornerstone in facilitating continuous and highly impactful improvements to enhance customer-centric value deliveries across your organization.

The evolving nature of VSM

A modern-day definition of VSM, as highlighted in a Forbes Innovation article by Flint Brenton, describes it as an Agile business practice aimed at evaluating the worth of software development and delivery endeavors and resources.8 It’s important to recognize that VSM has been a key part of value stream improvement since the early 2000s, originating in non-IT domains. In this book, you will learn how to apply VSM methods and tools to enhance software development and also to optimize any value stream within your organization.

Describing the VSM methodology

The concepts behind modern VSM practices originally evolved to support other domains...

Leveraging IT is crucial in driving Lean-Agile improvements across the organization. Digital enhancements play a pivotal role in enhancing business processes, products, and services. By focusing on IT, organizations can become leaner, improving productivity and efficiencies throughout their operations.

Additionally, the IT organization supports business agility by providing the necessary information to adapt and evolve rapidly, supporting emergent business focuses, changing market dynamics, and evolving customer needs. In essence, IT acts as a catalyst for organizational transformation, enabling businesses to stay competitive and responsive in today’s dynamic marketplace.

But how do we determine the specific information required and its sources, as well as where to place our IT investment priorities? We’ll cover that topic in Chapter 5, Introducing the VSM Implementation Roadmap. But let’s start with a quick introduction...

In this chapter, we delved into the foundational principles of Lean, Agile, and VSM. We explored their collective strength in enhancing product development, managing transformative changes, and driving continuous improvements, especially in a digitally evolving landscape. Through these lenses, we unveiled how Lean amplifies productivity, Agile aids in navigating complex challenges, and VSM provides a structured method for pinpointing and addressing pivotal improvement opportunities, ensuring that all endeavors are constantly aligned with customer perspectives.

As we advance to Chapter 2, Solving Complex Business Problems with Agility, we will dive deeper into Agile’s organizational role in responding to change. We’ll explore the intricacies of frameworks such as Scrum and emphasize the importance of inter-team collaboration across value streams. This upcoming chapter promises insights into achieving harmony among teams throughout product life cycles for optimal...

This section is offered for those who want to evaluate comprehension and retention of the information provided in this chapter. There are 9 questions. The answers are provided in the subsection that follows. Recalling the exact verbiage across this book is not important. Instead, it’s more important to recall the concepts and their applications.

Let’s start:

1. Choose at least two of the four hallmarks of Lean
   • Foundational lean principles
   • Streamlining operations
   • Delivering customer value
   • Optimizing resources
2. True or false: Do Lean and Agile practices share common objectives?
3. What is another word that describes the iterative and incremental delivery process of mainstream Agile frameworks, such as Scrum and BLAST?
4. What is the Basic Lean-Agile Solutions Team (BLAST)?
5. What is the Business Agility System for the Enterprise (BASE)?
6. How does this book compare the relative strengths of Agile and Lean practices?
7. Identify the nine VSM steps...

1. Two hallmarks are Lean are: Foundational lean principles and Delivering customer value.
2. True: Lean and Agile practices share many common objectives, such as delivering customer-centric value, continuous improvements, making information visible, responsiveness, and respect for people.
3. Timeboxed is another word that describes the iterative and incremental delivery process of mainstream Agile frameworks, such as Scrum and BLAST.
4. A Basic Lean-Agile Solutions Team (BLAST) is a framework and pattern language that’s designed to help organizations orchestrate the activities of multiple teams involved in product delivery.
5. Business Agility System for the Enterprise (BASE) is a conceptual model and pattern language that’s designed to help organizations orchestrate the activities of multiple teams involved in product delivery.
6. This book compares the relative strengths of Agile and Lean practices as follows:
   1. Lean’s strength lies in its ability...

1. Tapscott, D. (1995). The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril In The Age of Networked Intelligence (1st ed.). McGraw Hill.
2. McChrystal, G. S. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio.
3. Reinertsen, D. G. (2009). The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. Celeritas Publishing.
4. Kersten, M. (2018). Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. IT Revolution Press.
5. Marquet, L. D. (2013). Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. Portfolio.
6. Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford University Press.
7. Deming, W. E. (2000). Out of the Crisis. MIT Press.
8. Brenton, F. (2019, July 8). What Is Value Stream Management? A Primer For Enterprise Leadership. Forbes Innovation Article. Retrieved from...