I like this quote from Rahm Emanuel, US President Barack Obama’s chief of staff:
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”
This was given as the opening line of a ThoughtWorks-sponsored breakfast briefing that I attended this morning. The topic was “Lean times require Lean Thinking” and was promoted thusly:
The Toyota Way, also known as Lean, was born from hardship and survival. It is an approach that does not rely on the accidental fortunate circumstance of being in a positive business climate. The system that propelled Toyota to the top of the global automotive industry is designed to succeed in both good times and bad.
Lean thinking fundamentally changes the engagement model between IT and the business, challenging traditional relationships with staff, customers and partners.
This session, presented by a partnership between ThoughtWorks and KM&T, explains the Lean approach to challenges, continuous improvement, productivity, and quality, and how these principles can help you deliver high-value, high-quality software solutions to reduce operational costs, increase pro?tability, and survive.
As the purse-strings tighten, maybe we can learn from Toyota’s experience: stop doing BDUF/waterfall projects, move our organisations from their currrent “Authority Focus” to a new “Responsibilty Focus”, start taking the Agile Manifesto to heart, start learning to actually use our technologies rather than fear them (newsflash: periodically snapshotting a database for ‘offline’ use is not inherently a safer solution to ‘live dipping’, even if it feels more comfortable; newsflash: the days when RAM/disk was more expensive than programmer time is long gone; newsflash: FTP is not the perfect SOA transport; newflash:a project’s success is not to be measured by the number of shelf-feet of documentation it produces; I could go on…and on…and on…)
I was particularly interested in the way that Toyota’s use of Lean helped get the Prius to market faster, at significantly lower cost and with far fewer team members than any other company could have managed.
Maybe interest in the agile methodologies is beginning to have an effect: perhaps Scrum, XP and Lean are about to go mainstream? There is certainly a lot more ‘buzz’ around now…
I can but dream!
