Lean Framework and software development

Today I was on a presentation regarding the Toyota manufacture principle.

Well somebody will say, great, what is so interesting in that?
The interesting thing was that the lecturer make a parallel to this principle and software development. The idea behind this lean philosophy is to eliminate the waste from the process. Everything has to be value driven.

This means that during the manufacture of one car or software there is necessary waste and total waste. Necessary waste means any operation that the client didn’t pay for it in a term of software development one of such waste is QA and Documentation. The client paid for the Software, but without these procedures, the program will become useless and buggy.

We should reduce everything unnecessarily and replace it with optimized processes.
We did one example where one person wrote on a white board the names of two of the participants. The order was first wrote the full name of participant #1 then of participant #2.

After that we repeated the experiment. This time the two names were written simultaneously, but this time two different participants were saying their names one letter at a time. This took twice the time to complete compare to the previous experiment.

Think about the work in your company or in your current workspace, and analyse how much it is optimized, maybe you could be inspired by the lean approach and eliminate a process that doesn’t help you.

Aleks Vladimriov is a Senior Software Developer, recognized Project Manager and Soft-skilled trainer and a coach.

Aleks Vladimirov

Solution Engineering Manager at Thales | Senior IT Professional | Startup Mentor and Product Manager

Bio

Aleks is experienced Product Manager with an engineer background and over 10 years of experience as a software developer. He works with different governments and is responsible for negotiation features and requirements, understanding the customers’ needs and supporting the senior management with regular reports and analysis. He held various positions starting as a software developer, moving to a team leader and software architect.

He strives in waterfall and agile environment alike. He is certified Scrum Master and Prince2 Practitioner and he knows how to design business processes and help teams optimize their work.
During his tenure, he had to wear many hats, prioritizing business requirements, delegating work and mentoring team members, creating mockups with Balsamiq, providing MS Project plan to the senior management.

He had worked in many international teams, located in the same city or distributed in different countries and continents. He had been a team leader of cross functional international team of 8 people.

In his current position, he is very much client focused. He has excellent presentation skills.
He delivers training sessions on presentation skills and leadership and he had helped hundred of people to improve their presentation skills.

He is also interested in creating more positive changes in the workplace by using entrepreneurship skills.
He had won startup competition where his team had validated and develop a business idea from scratch.

In his free time, he writes in his blog about effective product development.