On Friday the 13th I saw Jim Brisson lead a discussion on Lean.

The event was at Inventive in Austin, Texas and this was a SIG as a part of Agile Austin that happened over the lunch hour. More specifically, this was a Lean Coffee meeting which is an informal meeting with a flexible agenda in which the participants vote up what they want to talk about. Jim Brisson is the Agile coach at Dell, but he did not define the agenda. We the crowd did that. Lean is different from Agility. One is either Lean or Agile and one does Kanban with Lean or Scrum with Agile. I have long been appalled with the ScrumBut of Scrumban in which a team estimates points not to show a burn down chart and a hey-we-cannot-get-everything-in-guys mindset but instead to just try to fill a sprint with gunk to do short term. It was pointed out to me in this session that maybe this isn't so bad. This came up under the guise of the question "How do we talk a business into Lean?" and the pain point seemed to be that so many characters in the sea, project managers and the like, rely on time. The counterargument that Scrum isn't better because the estimates for size (time) are always flawed may be a reality that is often lost on such persons, so why not just do pseudoscrum for them? Maybe it is not the end of the world. The argument to be made, if you want to argue for Kanban, is to argue for continuous improvement. WIP stands for work in progress and work in progress limits differ from lead time (a.k.a. cycle time) which is a measure of how much raw time it took for any one card (we kept calling them Chiclets) to progress from left to right on the Kanban board. WIP limits represent how many balls you can juggle, i.e. how many cards may be on the Kanban board at one time. The WIP limit should be less than the number of developers and that should give you some wiggle room to adjust for surprises. In waterfall one has huge batches which arguably become sprints in the miniwaterfalls of Agile. In Lean throughput is the measurement of velocity. Little's Law, named for a John Little, defines WIP as throughput multiplied by lead time. VSM (value stream mapping) defines the hops on a Kanban board that a card must go through. The VSM process is really for the business people to see to get them involved. Anytime you apply words to you actions ("Lean") those listening tend to focus on the word and not the action so the visual of the board would help therein. It gets people out of working in knowledge silos on, well, development in silos. When you "expedite" in Lean it breaks all WIP limit boundaries. You should not expedite more than one thing at a time and you should use expedite to fight fires. An MVP (minimal viable product) is for seeing if an idea is good (think prototype) more than making an actual product. In a J Curve productivity goes down at first before it eventually swings back up. You dive into a J Curve in doing something new and if you are to dive into J Curve after J Curve the curves need to be spaced far enough apart for you to be up on the chart past the starting point before dipping down anew in a new curve.