Session Information:

Unlocking Potential - Increasing business agility through integration of skills and techniques

Session Transcript:

Hello, my name is Alka Bhave and I'm the vice president of performance excellence at Perspecta. Perspecta is a leading it services and system engineering provider serving the U.S. public sector which is federal state and local government. I'm also a safe agilest lead six sigma master black belt and project management professional.

Today I'm going to tell you about the benefit of combining two very powerful methodologies scaled agile framework and lean six sigma to harness optimal efficiencies and increase business agilities so let's dive right in side two the digital shift the world is experiencing a digital shift this is the fourth industrial revolution and is focused around velocity scope and system level impact this exponential pace of change is driving a need for increased efficiency automation of actions volume and more data to make those critical businesses and mission decisions this digital revolution is also Driving software into every element of work and life so the need for businesses to achieve agility in operations is critical.

We need to rethink how to apply individual approaches tools and frameworks to harness the collective benefit and unlock the potential of an organization so let's move on to slide three so there is a mindset chasm and how do we cross it so when we think of achieving agility and transformation it's much more than employing a technology.

We know that there is a process people and data element that is often more difficult to implement than the technology itself there is a paradigm shift in working differently and smarter working more efficiently as business leaders the challenge for us is to look beyond the individual capabilities of what we have and look at the broader bigger picture of what it is that we're trying to achieve, when we take a step back and look at the enterprise and we realize that we have at our disposal great skill sets and capabilities within the organization that when combined would provide an exponential increase in value two such skill sets and approaches are lean six sigma and scaled agile framework.

Lean six sigma has been around for a long time and while safe is relatively newer these two have a great deal of synergy however they're still largely being employed in stove pipes across organizations for those of us that are driving business transformation and operational excellence within our companies there is much to gain by putting these techniques and skill sets together that requires us as business leaders to cross the mindset chasm.

Let's now move on to slide four and dig into this a little bit deeper so when looking at our synergistic frameworks lean six sigma and safe we see that there's a bit of overlap between the two that we can harness and put together so lead six sigma is a management framework containing two bodies of knowledge.

Lean which is focused on increasing efficiency and reducing non-value add and waist and six sigma which is focused on increasing repeatability and precision now safe is a leading framework for g scaling agility and achieving agile across an enterprise it is an approach to develop software hardware and systems at scale and fundamentally agile is based on the lean body of knowledge as is safe so when we look at the venn diagram of these two the intersection of these frameworks really lies in the foundation and application of lean and the concept of built in or designed in quality.

Which is designed for six sigma in save 5.0 built-in quality practices ensure that the solution element at every increment meets appropriate quality standards throughout development built-in quality is also a core principle of the lean agile mindset helping to avoid cost of delays associated with recalls with rework and just by generally fixing defects so these two frameworks really do have a strong foundation in common so why not integrate the skills and techniques this will only strengthen product and service delivery.

So let's now move on to slide five which goes into a theoretical look at these two frameworks and the core values so looking deeper into the details core 5.0 has 10 core principles they are listed above taking an economic view applying systems level thinking assuming ariability visualizing and limiting work in progress reducing batch sizes and managing queue and weight links also applying and working on cadence synchronizing with cross-domain planning unlocking.

The intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers decentralizing decision-making and organizing value so when we really peel back each of these we really see kind of common themes emerging it's reducing size and quantity and working in smaller increments managing that cycle time understanding the value stream making sure that the organizations are working well together giving power to those that are actually working by decentralizing decision making and organizing around value a very critical concept also a key concept in safe 5.0 is customer centricity now looking at the lean six sigma principles basically in six sigma principles including establishing value from the customer's perspective which is right back at customer centricity understanding how work is done.

Which is really the value stream improving flow reducing non-value add and applying cadence to match customer versus pull versus push reducing variability involving and equipping people in the process and undertaking improvement in a systematic way now as you can see there is significant synergy between these two techniques understanding the cross domain value stream and organizing around it designing in efficiencies to focus on pull and maintaining cadence and keeping customer focus at the center is where these intersect.

Now, there is one area where there is variability and that is around that difference so when a safe assumes variability lean six sigma limits it so what happens when you put these two together do we have a conflict well what you really get is the opportunity to implement those guardrails still allowing for innovation and we're going to talk about that more in a minute so with that let's move on to slide six ordered chaos so this variability and putting the guardrails on variability while still supporting innovation is what we're giving the term order chaos this combination concept really means that you can have flexibility for innovation while still providing guardrails to ensure the right planning for success innovation innovation needs ability to experiment incrementally cycle and work outside of the proverbial box variability is supported when an organization is agile but agility still needs those guard rails in order to have a solid implementation approach.

I'm sure many of us in industry that are in this space have seen common failure modes including inadequate experience with agile methods lack of understanding of the required broader organizational change company philosophy clashing or at odds with agile values and most importantly a lack of an enterprise value stream understanding now the customer has to be kept at the core as business leaders we know this all too well but when it comes to deploying techniques and developing software developing hardware implementing systems at scale that customer centricity is even more important and so those outcomes and outputs delivered need to be at that desired speed.

So really when we think about putting these techniques together it's not about over-planning or moving too quickly but rather moving purposefully and moving purposefully requires those guardrails interestingly enough there have been several studies on traditional versus agile development using chaos theory as these methods are both based on human activity now modeling and analysis of these metrics are performed using chaos theory and initial results have shown that agile methods produce more chaotic metric sequences so lean six sigma adds that order to the chaos to provide the guardrails let's now move on to slide seven go into a little bit few more details specifically save 5.0 so slide 7 provides the safe 5.0 big picture the big picture pulls both sets of principles into a framework based on the seven safe competencies.

So let's go into those competencies which are listed in slide eights the seven competencies of the lean enterprise are enterprise solution delivery agile product delivery lean portfolio management organizational agility team and technical agility and lean agile leadership the lean agile leadership competency describes how lean agile leaders drive and sustain organizations change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential they do this through leading by example learning and modeling saves lean agile mindset principles values and practices and leading the change to a new way of thinking.

This is very synergistic to very core competencies in six sigma where we are change agents another is continuous learning culture this is achieved by becoming a learning organization committing to relentless improvement and promoting a culture of innovation now in that quest for continuous improvement is measuring and growing measuring and growing is the way a portfolio of value streams evaluates its progress towards business agility and determines improvement steps so all key critical concepts to look at when you're looking at the intersection point of agile and lean six sigma let's move on to slide nine slide nine provides the safe implementation roadmap the safe implementation roadmap describes the steps or critical moves that an enterprise can take to implement safe in an orderly reliable and successful fashion so let's go into this implementation roadmap and dig in a little deeper to see exactly where lean six sigma belts can help that implementation moving on to slide 10.

This is where it becomes clearer on how tointegrate lean six sigma with safe and why as you can see on slide 10, the black belt icons show where value is added by the support of a lean six sigma black belt or green belt over the multiple phases of the journey so as you can see it is a combination of skills and techniques over the course of the implementation let's move on to slide 11 going a little bit more deeper.

So slide 11 talks a little bit more about these intersection points in phase one integrating the lean six sigma belts in the formation of the leading agile center of excellence is a great way to start the implementation in the second phase where you see identify value streams and arts that's where a lean six sigma belt can be critical in performance value stream mapping understanding the value stream is a critical element of safe yet one of the common pitfalls that I've experienced is teams don't quite understand what that looks like and where the handoffs are and where the bottlenecks are so leverage.

Your organization's music signal belts to conduct a value stream mapping event map out the as-is state baseline the metrics and use the value stream there and the 2b state as a guide in setting up how your organization's operations will shift to supporting agile now in box number three where you have implementation plan plan that value stream mapping action plan that comes out of that value stream mapping event serves as your implementation plan provides the metrics it provides the action items provides due dates this is an example of the guardrails mentioned in the previous slide now moving on the the black belt or green belt can also add significant value in the arc deployment as the implementation continues in that arc deployment multiple value streams are identified and again value stream mapping techniques can be employed additionally black belts are skilled at root cause analysis techniques quality function employment and other voice of the customer techniques additionally statistical analysis elements can be brought in to help understand how well an organization is conducting their implementation finally towards the end in expanding to the portfolio black belts again are skilled in that voice of the customer and kano analysis and looking across the portfolio and leveraging these techniques is critical in ensuring that continued customer centricity as your agile implementation continues now let's move on to slide 12.

So in slide 12 really how can you as a business leader implement this concept and unlock your organization's potential by number one integrating these synergistic approaches but how so there are three kind of themes to think about and ways to do this when you're planning out this integration first build the lean agile leadership business leaders make sure that they are cross-trained in both lean six sigma and safe your business leaders should understand these basic basic methodologies the theory behind them so that it becomes quite evident how these two come together second ensuring your communities of practice are not stove piped bring together your lean six sigma belts and your agile sneeze make this the lean agile center of excellence and cross train them both make sure that your agilists your spcs and your practitioners are also lean six sigma black belts and green belts that they understand the theory and know how these two can be brought together this is one of the most important things and essential to assisting that rich make it your solution to deploy together design in the techniques really understand that value stream map it and improve it and then organize around that improved value stream to be state conduct design thinking workshops for continued customer centricity and leverage your green belts and black belts to do to lead these workshops and remember the concept of that chaos and providing the flexibility for innovation while providing the guard rails to ensure the right planning for success.

So now let's move on to an example a perspective example of how we implemented this of how we combined our skill sets and improved and agile deployment in this case the opportunity or problem depending upon how you look at it was that a large highly complex software development program desired to migrate from waterfall towards agile methods but the process and the cycle time that they were experiencing was extremely lengthy so before venturing out into deployment of agile the team thought they wanted to figure out where their bottlenecks were and how they could improve improve and integrate agile methods into that deployment so what we did well a lean six sigma master black belt and green belt led a three day value stream mapping workshop on software development.

We identified handoffs bottlenecks cycle times and q delays resulting in low productivity the median delay that was identified through this highly complex process was identified and identified to be 379 days unacceptable for any organization in the event we've generated 40 high value ideas for improvement to process development methodology and tools and we developed plans to implement continuous integration earlier customer involvement again keeping focus on customer centricity identify those metrics to drive continuous improvement and development of environment improvements so we started integrating agile concepts into this deployment at the end we developed the base implementation plan for that first safe pilot so the outcome of this value stream mapping event was significant in multiple ways number one we developed a 2b process resulting in the reduction of delays from 379 days to 56 days.

That was a significant noteworthy outcome and that was projected to be 56 days with the inclusion of improvements specifically in development methodologies and the incorporation of agile so it really set the right foundation for that evolution toward agile it created the guard rails and provided the proper planning and provided the proper foundation for this team to go off onto their deployment moving on to our summary so in summary coming back to the broader concept the digital revolution is transforming in the way which we work we need to have technical and business agility we need to be better faster and highly mean but with predictable outcome so we need to move away from those stove pipes and combine those skills and techniques as discussed throughout this presentation.

There is a significant benefit in converging lean six sigma to sigma and scaled agile framework expertise to yield a true lean agile center of excellence safe 5.0 well integrates lean and six sigma principles already into their framework it's a combination of resources and deployment though that is really critical so bring together your safe agilis and your lean six sigma black belts and green belts in your deployments put them together they are a natural fit cross train them a one way is to make sure that your scrum masters are also green belts this increases the opportunities for your organization's team members to increase their and utilize their skill sets provides cross-training for leaders and provides cross-training for practice experts and by making this combination and deploying it and implementing it together you will combine and unlock your organization's potential so thank you for listening to my presentation.