#GOTOpodcast with @fab-ber.bsky.social and Steve Pereira on The Lean Tech Manifesto.
Key takeaways 👇
* Lean scales where agile struggles
* It’s about people, not processes
* Networks beat hierarchies
🎧 Listen in: gotopia.tech/podcast
Steve Pereira interviews @fab-ber.bsky.social on The Lean Tech Manifesto - scaling agile with lean principles while keeping humans at the center. A must-read for tech leaders.
This is the idea we tried to capture with the Tech-Enabled Network of Teams principle in The Lean Tech Manifesto: leveraging tech innovation to reduce the need for coordination between teams and increase autonomy at scale.
#LeanTech #TechEnabledNetworkOfTeams
The result: a big update in their design takes them days instead of months, the industry standard. The result is safer, thanks to the automated checks and the lack of copy-pasting errors.
And the teams can focus on real value, creating ingenious technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
This allows them to make multiple changes a day and even automate the verification of engineering and regulatory requirements.
The best implementation I have seen of this is at Jimmy Energy, which are building micro nuclear reactors to decarbonise industrial heat. Their whole system is modeled using Python and all the changes are synchronised using Github.
The digital-modeling approach of Model-Based Systems Engineering creates a single source of truth for the system on which every team can autonomously contribute, while technology enables seamless synchronisation.
Every time one stakeholder changes a requirement in one document, it requires every other team to synchronise and manually update their documents. This makes every change slow and frustrating, as teams waste time dealing with other teams' changes rather than think about the best technical solutions
The old way is the document-based approach: many documents are generated by different teams to capture the system's design from various stakeholder views, such as software, hardware, safety, manufacturing, etc.
How can engineering teams maintain autonomy when they are collaborating with many other teams on a complex system?
There has been a rising answer to this problem in the non-software world: Model-Based Systems Engineering.
If that instant feedback helps them save iterations, there is a real impact on overall lead time, and therefore productivity at organisational level.
A good example is the interaction between a team doing work and a team validating that work - think compliance teams for example. If you can clone part of their expertise into an AI twin that does a decent first pass, the first team can get instant feedback on how valid their work is.
It's the "Tech-Enabled Network of Teams" principle: finding ways technology can increase team autonomy, by removing or reducing dependencies with other teams in the organisation.
That's why I prefer looking at the uses of AI that don't just increase individual productivity but change the way teams collaborate.
Using AI to increase individual productivity feels like this cartoon: you might have saved time personally, but it's probably not changing much at the organisational level. Or worse, you could actually be creating more work down the line.
If this tooling is just half as powerful as the article suggests - this is a revolution in the DX of authoring native modules for React Native hacks.mozilla.org/2024/12/intr...
If you want to hear more about it, we will be discussing this tomorrow (Friday 6th December) with Philippe Guenet in the Digital Leadership meetup at 12 pm BT / 13h CET:
www.meetup.com/digitallead...
The #LeanTech approach to quality: shift-left the detection of defects (jidoka), analyse defects systematically to learn (#dantotsu) and invest in mistake-preventing environments (poka-yoke)
The Lean Tech Manifesto
That's the book mentioned: www.amazon.fr/Toyota-Danto...
But if you want a more comestible book, that covers all the points in the talk, I would recommend: www.amazon.fr/Lean-Tech-Ma... ;-)
Les histoires de gemba de @nicolas.silberman.fr étaient passionnantes
@sandrineolivenc @thatludi I hope you don't mind me illustrating those gembas with a photo of you :-)
One of the take-away that stood out during Q&A were the regular gemba walks from Nicolas, to "go and see" what really happens on the ground and discuss with the teams to better understand the problems they face and the potential opportunities for customers.
Congratulations to everyone who worked hard to achieve those results, from the initial PGE platform to successful scale!
After this incredible success, we shared the challenges the organisation faced to maintain agility while scaling to 300 people, and the Lean Tech countermeasures that were implemented.
The results 5 years later are impressive:
- 89% client satisfaction
- 40 deployments per day
- 50+ employee NPS
It all started with an initial team of 10 that unexpectedly ended up at the heart of the Covid response in March 2020. When lockdown hit, they were given 5 days to build the PGE (Prêt Garanti par l'État) platform, to help businesses across France with 1 billion € of state-guaranteed loans.
This morning, @nsilberman and I were at Devops REX to share the inspiring story of Bpifrance's Digital Factory and how it leveraged #LeanTech to maintain agility while scaling.
The vision is that, done right, organisations at any size can bring more ingenious solutions to the millions of small problems they face locally, and this way contribute to solving some of today's problems.
Lean Tech is about promoting a different leadership model to help organisations tap into their collective intelligence, whatever the scale.
Glad to see #LeanTech resonating with the challenges of tech leaders at @TechRocksFr
As someone challenged during the QA session, why promote scale in today's context?
Lean Tech is not about promoting scale...
