Organizational issues come into discussion every time we talk about agile adoption. Creating a really lean and agile organization has been found very difficult. It has been asked whether that is even possible, not to talk about being sustainable.

In current economic situation savings are the appealing part of lean thinking. The more important part, empowering the ordinary people, is hard to justify. On the contrary, power is restricted to the (upper) management especially when we talk about costs. Layouts are also used to save.

Fortunately, the availability of software development jobs is still quite good, which means that volunteered change of ones job is the way to do that. To many organizations becoming lean means layouts. Some of the them even get rid of unnecessary management layers. But, the big but. Really working together as teams and collaborating parties is far away if we are not talking about Japan where jobs are for life (maybe still). Layouts do bad to morale and motivation and organizations look like frozen. No innovations, no new ideas, just unspoken fear and risk avoidance.

Obviously, becoming lean means losing fat, but it also means that you will become more energetic, capable. I am speaking now both the people in individual level and the organizations.We have learned that economic downturns will end some day. So, the tactic of waiting has become popular. We assume that we can just sleep the bad time away and continue as usual. Unfortunately that is not how the market economy works. Downturns are the time for restructuring the businesses. Some old ways of doing business will be gone forever and new businesses have to be started. You lose your opportunity if you dig to your pothole. So, instead of just keeping your old cows and killing the calves, you should consider doing just the opposite. Getting money from your cows is of course important especially when you are running out of cash, but old cows do not milk forever. You must have courage to take your changes.

Here I am talking about the opportunities of lean and agile software development. Being effective and capable of utilizing the opportunities is always fashionable. Now we have the theories of lean thinking available.  The question is,  do you take the opportunity or does your competitor.

Kalle Huhtala’s talk about practical experiences of lean software development is now down-loadable from the site of the Projektipäivät. It is in Finnish, sorry. Unfortunately I could not take part of this day but knowing Kalle, I am sure that it was a good talk.

Tieturi is a training and coaching house but we do some in-house software development to create solutions for eLearning. These projects are quite small and Kalle’s team serves multiple customers at a time. RePa is an excel sheet that is used to manage the tasks and resources. It can be classified as a kanban, because there is only one list of things to do.

A dedicated one hour weekly meeting is used to have the coordination discussions in addition what happens ad hoc in the team room.

Experiences of RePa are quite good as you can assume when you hear that we have used that for eight years. Our process has helped us to balance the work in progress and resources that we have. Limiting work to capacity is important because failures or false promises are not an option in small projects that we do.

ELearning is the answer that queue theory gives to trainer’s value stream. You can start learn as soon as you have bought the solution and you can proceed on your own when you have time. There is no need to gather large numbers of students to classes. The solutions are smaller than several days that you typically spend to a class. You can spend just minutes to learn something that is very specific to your actual need. For example, if you want to know how to use links in WordPress, you could just start a video that teaches to you to do it.