The Lean-Agile Way

Discover how mastering Lean, Agile, and VSM principles and practices can enhance your product delivery performance, mitigate risk, and foster business agility, giving you a competitive edge

Key Features

• Learn how to apply Lean practices to eliminate waste and delays, ensuring value for your customers
• Master Agile practices to address problems and create value-centric products and services
• Explore VSM methods and tools to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities that maximize value addition
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, efficiency is essential. Authored by industry experts Cecil ‘Gary’ Rupp, a Lean-Agile consultant with over three decades of executive experience; Richard Knaster, a SAFe® Fellow and transformation leader; Steve Pereira, a value stream consultant and board advisor; and Al Shalloway, creator of FLEX and PMI’s Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant workshop, the book offers proven strategies to streamline processes, enhance products, and improve service delivery.

You’ll start with an introduction to foundational Lean and Agile practices, recognizing the significance of digital enhancements in modernizing business processes. As you progress, you'll learn VSM techniques to identify and prioritize work and investments to provide maximum value to customers. Moreover, you'll grasp Lean-Agile practices aimed at promoting collaboration among teams and ensuring the continuous flow of product-oriented deliveries tailored to address customer needs. Finally, you'll gain executive-level insights on how organizations must access timely information for decision-making and foster a culture of continuous business transformation.

Armed with this knowledge and a robust toolkit, you'll be empowered to drive meaningful change, optimize resources, and stay ahead in the rapidly evolving marketplace.

What you will learn

• Understand how to integrate the seemingly disparate practices of Lean and Agile
• Integrate Lean, Agile, and VSM to accelerate value flow, enhance efficiency, and drive improvements
• Drive product-oriented transformations with business increments, Lean-Agile teams, product lifecycles, VSM, and IT alignment
• Leverage the VSM implementation roadmap to drive digital value stream enhancements
• Investigate advanced VSM tools/platforms, AI insights, and VSMP selection criteria
• Explore Lean-Agile/VSM success stories to gain implementation insights

Who this book is for

This Lean-Agile book is for business and technology professionals striving to optimize value delivery while minimizing costs. Whether you're a VSM manager, a member of a product delivery team, DevOps engineer, or an IT specialist, this book offers proven methods for effectively identifying and implementing improvement opportunities. Product owners looking to prioritize backlog items and corporate executives aiming to demonstrate positive returns on information technology investments will also find this book helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Navigating Lean-Agile Transformations
2. Solving Complex Business Problems with Agility
3. Establishing Lean Flows to Improve Productivity
4. Driving Improvements with Value Stream Management
5. Introducing the VSM Implementation Roadmap
6. Navigating Value Stream Optimization
7. Connecting the Value Stream Network
8. Implementing the Basic Lean-Agile Solution Team (BLAST)
9. Defining a Business Agility System for the Enterprise (BASE)
10. Enhancing Decision-Making in the Lean-Agile Organization

(N.B. Please use the Read Sample option to see further chapters)

Cecil ‘Gary' Rupp is a Lean-Agile consultant and practitioner with more than two decades of executive-level experience in delivering software-based solutions. With SAFe® SPC, LeSS Practitioner, CSM, CSPO, and PM P certifications, he specializes in managing large software development and enterprise application integration programs involving multiple product delivery teams and is often brought in to get failing software delivery programs back on track. Gary is the author of four books emphasizing Lean-Agile practices and has trained over 600 IT specialists, managers, and executives in applying these practices to support enterprise business transformations. His passion is helping organizations profitably deliver customer value through software.

Richard Knaster has over 30 years of experience in software and systems development and has led large-scale Lean-Agile transformations for over 20 years. He is a SAFe® Fellow, SPCT, and a methodologist. He previously worked for Scaled Agile as a Principal Contributor to SAFe® on the Framework team. He is the author of Value Stream Management for the Digital Age eBook and co-author of the Amazon best-selling book, SAFe Distilled book series. Richard is a global keynote speaker and has written several white papers on SAFe® and Technology Business Management. He is the Chief Scientist for Value Stream Management for Agile Rising where he shares his deep expertise in Value Stream Management, Lean Portfolio Management, and SAFe®. Richard is also a Bain & Company Advisor and has held several executive roles in various industries, including CIO, CTO, and Director of Product Development.

Steve Pereira is a value stream consultant with over two decades of experience in tech. He specializes in helping teams define and optimize their value streams. He's helped dozens of organizations of all sizes across many industries improve their software delivery performance. Steve is a former startup CTO, systems and release engineer, finance IT manager, tech support phone jockey, and pizza maker. He currently leads several tech communities and serves as a board advisor for the Value Stream Management Consortium, and as co-chair for the Value Stream Management Interoperability technical committee.

Al Shalloway is the CEO of Success Engineering and is renowned for developing FLEX (FLow for Enterprise Transformation) which is the basis for PMI's Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant workshop. He has since created the Amplio system which is getting recognition as a leading Lean-Agile approach. Holding master's degrees from MIT and Emory in EE and computer science and mathematics, he's an international speaker, former SPC Trainer, and SAFe® contributor. He is also the co-author of 7 books, spanning Design Patterns to Agile at Scale. Al is an influential figure in Lean, SAFe®, Kanban, Scrum, Design Patterns, and ATDD. Al empowers clients to implement Agile practices at scale and trains internal change agents for efficient team development.