🔑 5 Key Lean Principles to Strengthen Agile
1. Customer Value Every decision should start with the question: Does this deliver direct value to the end user? – In practice: Apply “value slicing” when creating the backlog, not just splitting it by technical components.
2. Identify and Eliminate Waste (Muda) Excess approvals, unnecessary reports, or pointless meetings. – In practice: Measure “touch time vs. wait time” in the workflow and eliminate the points where work is stalled.
3. Flow Work should move smoothly, not jump from place to place. – In practice: Combine a Kanban board with WIP limits even in a Scrum environment.
4. Quality Built-In Quality must be integrated into every step, not just inspected at the end. – In practice: Enforce a strict and consistently applied Definition of Done.
5. Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) Retrospectives should not be a ritual but a tool for experimentation. – In practice: After every retrospective, pick one concrete change to test in the next sprint.
⚙️ How to Start Implementation
1. Map the current value stream: visualize every step from idea to production.
2. Pick quick wins: remove the biggest source of waste with the least effort first.
3. Measure impact: track lead time, throughput, and number of interruptions.
🎭 Waste Elimination (Muda) – 7 Types of Waste in Modern Scrum
- Transport waste: Moving information, responsibility, and work between teams/people without adding value. Often invisible—teams seem busy, but time is lost in waiting.
- Inventory waste: Accumulated unfinished features—value frozen in the system, code or functionality that never reaches customers.
- Motion waste: Frequent multitasking, context switching, scattered information, or unnecessary micromanagement.
- Waiting waste: In software development, overlaps with transport waste.
- Overproduction waste: Excess documentation or “just in case” features slow down the delivery of real customer value.
- Over-processing waste: Any extra effort, complexity, or steps that don’t add customer value and only increase cost and delivery time.
- Defect waste: Bugs, design flaws, missing or misleading documentation, or incorrect implementation—anything that causes rework.
💡 Biggest Lessons from a Lean–Agile System
- The biggest bottlenecks are not technical—they’re procedural.
- A pull system (bringing work into the sprint based on capacity and priority) requires a more senior team.
- Waste elimination is a never-ending journey.
🏁 Conclusion
Use Lean to look beyond your team and identify waste across the entire value stream—from idea to customer delivery. If you can help the team see what true value is and ruthlessly remove everything that isn’t, you’ll transform them.