Lean Enterprise

Book description

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale—and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization, rather than with just one department or team.

Through case studies, you’ll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance. Adopting Lean will take time and commitment, but it’s vital for harnessing the cultural and technical forces that are accelerating the rate of innovation.

  • Discover how Lean focuses on people and teamwork at every level, in contrast to traditional management practices
  • Approach problem-solving experimentally, by exploring solutions, testing assumptions, and getting feedback from real users
  • Lead and manage large-scale programs in a way that empowers employees, increases the speed and quality of delivery, and lowers costs
  • Learn how to implement ideas from the DevOps and Lean Startup movements even in complex, regulated environments

Publisher resources

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Table of contents

  1. Preface
    1. Why Did We Write This Book?
    2. Who Should Read This Book?
    3. Conspectus
      1. O’Reilly Online Learning
    4. How to Contact Us
    5. Acknowledgments
  2. I. Orient
    1. 1. Introduction
      1. A Lean Enterprise Is Primarily a Human System
      2. Mission Command: An Alternative to Command and Control
      3. Create Alignment at Scale Following the Principle of Mission
      4. Your People Are Your Competitive Advantage
    2. 2. Manage the Dynamics of the Enterprise Portfolio
      1. Exploring New Ideas
      2. Exploiting Validated Business Models
      3. Balancing the Enterprise Portfolio
      4. Conclusion
  3. II. Explore
    1. 3. Model and Measure Investment Risk
      1. Model Investment Risk
      2. Applying the Scientific Method to Product Development
      3. Principles for Exploration
      4. Conclusion
    2. 4. Explore Uncertainty to Detect Opportunities
      1. Discovery
        1. Creating a Shared Understanding
        2. Structured Exploration of Uncertainty
      2. What Business Are We In?
        1. Understanding Our Business Problem to Inform Our Business Plan
        2. Understanding Our Customers and Users
        3. Turning Insights and Data into Unfair Advantage
        4. Using Insight to Inform Hypotheses and Experiments
      3. Accelerate Experimentation with MVPs
        1. How Do Our Vision and MVP Work Together?
        2. The One Metric That Matters
      4. Conclusion
    3. 5. Evaluate the Product/Market Fit
      1. Innovation Accounting
      2. Do Things That Don’t Scale
        1. Customer Intimacy
        2. Build a Runway of Questions, Not Requirements
        3. Engineering Practices for Exploring
      3. Engines of Growth
      4. Transitioning Between Horizons to Grow and Transform
      5. Conclusion
  4. III. Exploit
    1. 6. Deploy Continuous Improvement
      1. The HP LaserJet Firmware Case Study
      2. Drive Down Costs Through Continuous Process Innovation Using the Improvement Kata
        1. Understand the Direction
        2. Planning: Grasp the Current Condition and Establish a Target Condition
        3. Getting to the Target Condition
        4. How the Improvement Kata Differs from Other Methodologies
      3. How the HP LaserJet Team Implemented the Improvement Kata
      4. Managing Demand
      5. Creating an Agile Enterprise
      6. Conclusion
    2. 7. Identify Value and Increase Flow
      1. The Maersk Case Study
      2. Increase Flow
        1. Map Your Product Development Value Streams
        2. Limit Work in Process
      3. Cost of Delay: A Framework for Decentralizing Economic Decisions
      4. Conclusion
    3. 8. Adopt Lean Engineering Practices
      1. The Fundamentals of Continuous Delivery
      2. Continuous Integration and Test Automation
      3. The Deployment Pipeline
      4. Decouple Deployment and Release
      5. Conclusion
    4. 9. Take an Experimental Approach to Product Development
      1. Using Impact Mapping to Create Hypotheses for the Next Iteration
      2. Performing User Research
      3. Online Controlled Experiments
      4. An A/B Test Example
      5. Prerequisites for an Experimental Approach to Product Development
      6. Conclusion
    5. 10. Implement Mission Command
      1. Amazon’s Approach to Growth
      2. Create Velocity at Scale Through Mission Command
      3. Evolving Your Architecture Using the Strangler Application Pattern
      4. Conclusion
  5. IV. Transform
    1. 11. Grow an Innovation Culture
      1. Model and Measure Your Culture
      2. Change Your Culture
        1. Make It Safe to Fail
      3. There Is No Talent Shortage
        1. Growing Talent
        2. Eliminate Hidden Bias
      4. Conclusion
    2. 12. Embrace Lean Thinking for Governance, Risk, and Compliance
      1. Understanding Governance, Risk, and Compliance
        1. Take an Evolutionary Approach to Risk Management
      2. Apply Lean Principles to GRC Processes
        1. Define the Value of GRC Processes from the Customer Perspective
      3. Map the Value Stream, Create Flow, and Establish a Pull System
        1. The Wrong Control Interrupts Flow
      4. Conclusion
    3. 13. Evolve Financial Management to Drive Product Innovation
      1. Introduction
      2. Dancing to the Beat of the Financial Drum Slows Innovation
      3. Liberating Ourselves from the Annual Budget Cycle
        1. Stop Conflating Good Financial Management with “The Budget”
        2. Disassociate Funding Decisions from the Annual Fiscal Cycle
        3. Explore Activity-Based Accounting Principles
      4. Avoid Using Budgets as the Basis for Performance Measurement
      5. Stop Basing Business Decisions on Capital Versus Operational Expense
      6. Modify Your IT Procurement Processes to Gain Greater Control over Value Delivery
      7. Conclusion
    4. 14. Turn IT into a Competitive Advantage
      1. Rethinking the IT Mindset
      2. Freedom and Responsibility
      3. Creating and Evolving Platforms
        1. Preparing for Disasters
      4. Managing Existing Systems
      5. Conclusion
    5. 15. Start Where You Are
      1. Principles of Organizational Change
        1. Aim Towards Strategy Deployment
      2. The UK Government Digital Service
      3. Begin Your Journey
      4. Conclusion
  6. Bibliography
  7. Index

Product information

  • Title: Lean Enterprise
  • Author(s): Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly
  • Release date: December 2014
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449368425