LEAN and AGILE METHODOLOGIES: OVERVIEW: IS LEAN and AGILE RIGHT FOR MY ORGANIZATION?

The following questions highlight issues that many organizations face. If you find yourself answering in the affirmative to any of them, then we have Lean and Agile solutions that are particularly suited to your challenges.

• Do you have significant quantities of partially done work at any one time over the course of a software release?
  (For example, if all of the requirements are 'done' and only half of the software is done, then you have 100% partially done work, since there is no working software ready to deploy.)

• If you were to track the life of one customer-centric feature from request through to delivery, would the time spent waiting in between steps in the process exceed 40% of the total time?
  (60% is not uncommon!)

• Are more than three handoffs between teams or groups occuring to deliver a piece of working functionality to a customer?
  (7 or more is not uncommon: For instance, sales -> PM -> analyst -> designer -> coder -> tester -> deployer)

• Is less than 50% of the total time that it takes to deliver software spent on activities that customers would willingly pay for if they had a choice?
  (For example, how much time is spent creating and reviewing documents that customers never see?)

• Are more than 50% of the features in your products used regularly by customers, on average?
  (A common metric is that 65% of all software is never actually used by customers.)

• Do your performers have to simultaneously support more than two projects at a time?
  (Note: Task switching allows projects to start sooner, but it almost always makes them finish later. )

If you are experiencing problems in any of these areas, then our Lean and Agile methods can help you to dramatically cut waste, deliver faster, with fewer resources, and with greater customer and employee satisfaction.

For more information contact Rodney Bodamer rbodamer@ccpace.com or call (703) 631-6600.