Lean-Agile Project Management

Leaders: Hillel Glazer, Masa Maeda, Senior Consultants, Cutter Consortium

The high level of competitiveness in domestic and international markets is forcing companies to be more efficient than ever at creating top-quality products and services that meet customers' real needs. And, organizations in regulated industries feel even more pressure than merely market forces to produce products and deliver services that not only meet customer's needs but also address compliance matters in a cost-effective way. Lean-Agile project management increases your ability to lead projects with the level of adaptability and quality of today's demands and manage your teams under a Kanban, Scrum, or Scrumban environment.

Lean-Agile project management merges Agile project management and recent advances on lean management for software development to expand the scope and depth of process improvement, encompassing the entire development process, accounting for regulations or other compliance matters when necessary, and resulting in an improvement in product and/or service quality, timeliness, and value from both the customer and organizational perspectives.

Lean-Agile project management provides the understanding, knowledge, and tools for continuous value flow delivery. This is achieved by improving

• Portfolio management and governance
• The development processes, from idea to requirements, delivery, and sustainment
• Communication and collaboration
• Adaptability and responsiveness
• Workloads, work priorities, and work-life balance
• Policies and practices that affect outcomes

These improvements, which could be supplemented with and enhanced by the development of a corporate governance framework, will help your organization balance the activities that make it possible to create continuous value flow, eliminate parts of the process that do not add value, and incrementally increase the level of development process automation.

Cutter's Lean-Agile team provides both coaching services and workshops to help your organization move along the Agile-Lean path to effective project management.

Consulting engagements are customized to your organization's specific needs. We begin with an organization assessment to understand your strengths and your improvement needs, and then work with you on to implement a set of management practices and lean-agile methodologies that will work best for your organization, be it a single methodology or a set of compatible methodologies. This is typically achieved through an initial phase that combines training (similar to that of the workshops described below) and consulting, and is then followed by periodic consulting days to guide and support your organization through the adoption itself.

The Lean-Agile for Project Managers and Leaders workshop is a two-day engagement during which you will acquire the knowledge necessary to manage your teams and projects using lean-agile thinking and tools; and will make you more effective in the use of Kanban, Scrum or other agile methodologies. This will give you the foundation to begin creating a culture of sustainable development and achieve continuous improvement with focus on value and quality.

Workshop Curriculum:

1. Introduction
   • Management challenges
   • Responsibility process
2. Lean-agile fundamentals
   • Lean thinking
   • Wastes
   • Principles
   • Kaizen
   • Agile thinking
   • Values
   • Principles
3. Leadership
   • Declaration of Interdependence
   • Formula for facilitating a lean culture
   • Dos and don'ts for motivation in lean-agile settings
4. Project management
   • The Lean-Agile Prism
   • Constraints
   • Quality
   • Value
   • Innovation
   • JIT and value streaming
   • Lean-agile portfolio management
   • Basics
   • Benefits
   • The role of quality
   • Quality-centric culture
   • Test quadrants
   • Two enterprise frameworks
   • Agile framework
   • Lean framework
   • Delivery framework
   • Iterative
   • Continuous Flow
5. The Lean-Agile manager
   • Creating the environment
   • Creating the team
6. Lean-Agile methodologies overview
   • a. Kanban
   • b. Scrum
   • c. Scrumban
7. Dealing with regulations and compliance matters
8. Lean-Agile Adoption at your organization

For more information on bringing Cutter's lean-agile service offerings to your organization, contact your Cutter Account Executive at sales@cutter.com or call +1 781 648 8700.