The article mentions Agile as an attempt to bring lean manufacturing methodology to software development. I make software which is used as part of lean manufacturing initiatives (among other initiatives), and see a lot of different manufacturing environments. I want to point out that lean manufacturing is often the wrong tool for producing significantly more of something complex or ramping up production speed of a complex product. In its defense, you could say that lean should be this tool, but is usually so misinterpreted or done so incorrectly that it fails to be this tool. (funny that agile reportedly has the same problem)
Generally speaking, lean is a tool for reducing various kinds of 'waste' and 'doing more with less'. That's the part people seem to focus on anyway. The problem is that people become myopic. Lean becomes the justification for premature optimization and focusing on details that don't matter.
Sometimes, waste is good. Or, stated differently, not all waste is equal. If you have 5 machines that each produce $1000 of value per hour run, and you're attempting to go lean by rearranging them so you can lay off a $20/hour employee, then you are focusing entirely on the wrong thing.
Lean is often pushed with the idea that employees shouldn't be standing around doing nothing, or that you shouldn't produce excess material which will sit in a pile. The problem with this is it often fails to account for needed excess capacity, and when something goes wrong, everything falls apart.
The correct move (depending on margins) is usually to hire more inexpensive humans to stand around and make sure the expensive machines never stop generating value because you overburdened one of the humans. When you want to make things faster, you don't stop producing when the next machine in the process can't keep up (producing a pile of unused parts). You buy another machine that performs the next process or figure out what it needs to run faster.
Lean is the methodology most people use when they can't make big changes that will have a major impact on production. It's a tool for making the existing (possibly broken) system function better. It's culturally good to focus on reducing waste, but often it's the waste you're not measuring or thinking about that's killing you.
Lean isn't bad any more than optimization is bad, it's just not the tool you typically want to be starting with. I work directly with customers, have no deadlines that aren't self imposed, and couldn't tell a story point from a scrum master, so I can't say if the failures of lean manufacturing implementation extend to agile, but I'd be curious to hear if they do.
Generally speaking, lean is a tool for reducing various kinds of 'waste' and 'doing more with less'. That's the part people seem to focus on anyway. The problem is that people become myopic. Lean becomes the justification for premature optimization and focusing on details that don't matter.
Sometimes, waste is good. Or, stated differently, not all waste is equal. If you have 5 machines that each produce $1000 of value per hour run, and you're attempting to go lean by rearranging them so you can lay off a $20/hour employee, then you are focusing entirely on the wrong thing.
Lean is often pushed with the idea that employees shouldn't be standing around doing nothing, or that you shouldn't produce excess material which will sit in a pile. The problem with this is it often fails to account for needed excess capacity, and when something goes wrong, everything falls apart.
The correct move (depending on margins) is usually to hire more inexpensive humans to stand around and make sure the expensive machines never stop generating value because you overburdened one of the humans. When you want to make things faster, you don't stop producing when the next machine in the process can't keep up (producing a pile of unused parts). You buy another machine that performs the next process or figure out what it needs to run faster.
Lean is the methodology most people use when they can't make big changes that will have a major impact on production. It's a tool for making the existing (possibly broken) system function better. It's culturally good to focus on reducing waste, but often it's the waste you're not measuring or thinking about that's killing you.
Lean isn't bad any more than optimization is bad, it's just not the tool you typically want to be starting with. I work directly with customers, have no deadlines that aren't self imposed, and couldn't tell a story point from a scrum master, so I can't say if the failures of lean manufacturing implementation extend to agile, but I'd be curious to hear if they do.
A tool I find more useful than lean: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints