Lean Agile: The competitive edge in Manufacturing Product Development

Lean Agile is a methodology that combines the principles of Lean, which focuses on reducing waste, and Agile, which emphasizes speed and flexibility in delivering value. Together, these approaches offer significant benefits that can transform the way an organization designs and delivers its products. These benefits include reduced time to market for product and services, increased flexibility and responsiveness while reducing risk across the whole organization.

By reviewing processes, management framework and tools you can use to support your organization, we will show you how to implement this methodology in your manufacturing business.

How to Define Your Processes and Deliverables

When diving into a Lean Agile optimization project, it's crucial to clearly define your processes and segment them into actionable phases. Each one should be tailored to produce a deliverable, and supported by clearly outlined roles within your teams.

This approach enables your organization to move toward simultaneous engineering, in which design, manufacturing, and assembly processes run in parallel through collaborative work. Implementing Lean and Agile methodologies from the ideation phase and maintaining them throughout every stage of your process ensures a quicker time-to-market. This method harnesses the full potential of your team's expertise precisely when needed, enhancing operational efficiency, driving innovation, and ensuring a lasting competitive advantage.

Segment your project into deliverables

As you segment your product development project into phases, be sure to identify the value and scope of deliverables associated with each segment. Keep these 3 steps in mind to help you:

1. Define the value of the deliverable: This will help avoid over or under-quality of the deliverable and thus maintain the efficiency of your production. Choosing the value of the deliverable in advance is also a way to force an agreement with the customer on this point. This eliminates much of the back and forth after production, as the customer knows what to expect.
2. Define the template and purpose of the deliverable: This saves time during its completion. By specifying its dimensions and their relevance, you ensure proper compliance. It also reduces your team's learning curve and eliminates wasted time experimenting during execution.
3. Develop a checklist: By listing all the criteria for what constitutes a "good deliverable" and reviewing them upon completion, you ensure its integrity. This allows you to both correct and limit errors in the future.

How to align Lean Agile management with the Scrum methodology.

Scrum is a framework that, through the implementation of time-bound and repetitive work cycles, supports the segmentation of your product development. To help you understand its principle, some specific vocabulary will help. These work cycles, called "Sprints", focus on the execution of logically grouped product deliverables. These deliverables are only a part of the final product, whose entire development effort is called the “product backlog”. This iterative framework relies on key roles with clear and distinct responsibilities, which we will explore below:

Key Roles of Scrum Teams

• The Product Owner represents the customer and embodies the product vision. As such, he is responsible for defining and prioritizing the logical work segments within the product backlog he owns.
• The Scrum Master is a leader who supports the team in practicing the Scrum framework of which he is the guardian.
• The development team is self-organized, consisting of 5-7 people with a diverse set of skills and expertise. They’re the ones who create value! Design, develop, plan... They deliver during every Sprint.

In the manufacturing industry we often call it the Scrum Team!

At Talan, we help you adapt this framework to your reality. Here are 2 roles that are sometimes added to the typical ones:

• During the sales phase, the technical sales engineer consults with the customer and aligns the desired product concept with the company's standards.
• The project manager: Integrating this role into a self-organizing Scrum team may not be immediately apparent. However, depending on your company's specifics, it can prove useful in resource and budget management. At Talan, we tailor the framework of the method to the on-the-ground reality of our partners.

Scrum Elements

The complementary strengths of Scrum team members enable them to efficiently deliver high-value, tangible outcomes, enhancing productivity and innovation. Here are the 7 elements of the Scrum framework your team will need to implement to optimize your product development according to the Lean Agile method.

What technology tools support Lean Agile?

Several tools can help you support your Scrum framework and thus your Lean Agile optimization project. Here is an overview of the most commonly used technology solutions:

To support the project history

• OneNote: A collaborative note-taking tool used to document information, ideas, and discussions during Scrum meetings.
• Confluence: A collaborative platform for creating, sharing, and organizing content.

To support task planning and follow-up

You can choose the software that best suits your needs:

• Jira: This is our team's favorite tool. Jira is a project management software that’s specially designed for agile teams. It allows you to create and track tasks, manage the product backlog, plan Sprints, and track the progress of work throughout the project lifecycle.
• Trello is a visual, table-based project management tool that helps individuals and teams organize, prioritize, and manage tasks efficiently.
• Asana is dedicated to project management, offering a platform for teams to plan projects by creating tasks, assigning responsibilities, setting deadlines, and tracking progress.
• Azure is a comprehensive toolset for project management that includes source code management for efficient version control and collaboration, task tracking for monitoring progress and assigning responsibilities, and agile planning for iterative development.

What indicators should be mobilized to support continuous improvement?

• Departmental workload planning will enable you to measure and balance the workload across your various teams.
• Measuring the number of hours dedicated to a specific expertise in the deliverable backlog will help you determine the type of work to be done according to skill profiles.
• Sprint velocity is a measure of the amount of work a team can accomplish during a Sprint.
• Assessing the accuracy of time estimates compared to the actual time required to complete a task is a surefire way to improve your planning.

To conclude

At Talan, our consultants support you in implementing your Lean Agile project to eliminate waste and optimize the efficiency of your manufacturing production. Learn more about the origins of this method and get in touch with us to explore how Lean Agile can unlock the full potential of your manufacturing business.