Lean Software Institute

Lean Software Management Strategies

Maximizing development speed and customer value, minimizing waste

San Diego, California – September 26, 2007, 8:30am-5pm

Seminar overview:

In this in-depth seminar, you will learn about strategies and principles that will help you
reduce development schedules by up to 70%, while reducing costs and improving quality.
Using Lean strategies helps you avoid non-value-added work, improve innovation
capacity, and deliver more value to your customers.

You will learn about:

• Quickly diagnosing your execution challenges

o Why as much as 95% of your development lead time may be non-value-added

o Identifying, quantifying, and ranking your execution bottlenecks (waste)

• Implementing remedies to respond faster to customer needs

o Setting clear, quantifiable goals for products and processes

o Focusing on customer value, avoiding features that add little or no value
o Reducing delays and rework due to defects (often 50% of development effort)
o Accelerated problem-solving with collaborative workspaces
o Reducing schedule and risk with Set-Based Concurrent Engineering
o Overcoming barriers between departments, groups, and teams
o Removing non-value-added activities to reduce delivery time, effort, and cost
o Eliminating sources of wait time (e.g. queues and capacity imbalances)
o Just-in-time response to customer demand instead of slower, plan-driven work
o Providing real-time insight into actual progress for teams and executives

• Making changes stick, going beyond initial improvements

o Establishing a continuous process of reflection, learning, and improvement

o Overcoming leadership challenges that hamper organizational learning
o Using Lean to take your existing Agile or CMMI efforts to the next level
o Applying Lean strategies to outsourcing and distributed development

Audience:

This event is targeted at managers and senior management in software companies and IT
organizations that are under pressure to deliver quality software at a faster pace. Bring
your own projects to work on – we guarantee you will leave the seminar with actionable
ideas for how you can deliver faster, improve customer satisfaction, and prevent defects.

1
 Lean Software Institute

What is Lean?
The software industry has evolved to embrace increasing globalization, just-in-time
delivery and payment (SaaS), and an increasing expectation of customer focus. Product
and process complexity is increasing, and customers are becoming less tolerant of quality
problems. To remain competitive, IT and software executives are looking for ideas to
accelerate innovation, develop software faster, and improve the customer’s experience.

The Lean methodology for dramatically improving business performance began at

Toyota. The company has been benchmarked to develop new products 2-3 faster than its
competitors, with four times the R&D productivity. This year, Toyota is passing GM to
become the #1 car company in the world. In the last decade, Lean has spread to a huge
range of industries. World class organizations like Boeing, Intel, Cardinal Health,
Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Starbucks, and General Electric have all realized
significant financial gains from their Lean initiatives.

Lean is now making an impact in the software industry. McKinsey recently published a
whitepaper endorsing Lean, citing impressive lead time reduction and productivity
improvements based on interviews with 30 CIOs. Outsourcing giant Wipro began its
Lean effort three years ago and has seen similarly encouraging results. Well-known
commercial software companies have also used Lean principles and practices to achieve
significant improvements.

Documented results from using Lean Software Management strategies include:

• 64% reduction in time to define/change product requirements (medical dev. software)

• 76% reduction in time to deliver a new feature (aerospace/defense company)
• 40% reduction in software defects (commercial software company)
• Catching up with 18-month backlog of undelivered feature requests (commercial)
• Prevent 90% of defects from being introduced into the software (commercial)
• Increased ability to detect and respond to real customer needs (everyone)

Other key benefits of Lean in a software industry setting include:

• Focused on delivering quantifiable customer value and improving profitability

• Company-wide framework for working smarter, not limited to IT/Engineering
• Easy to get started and achieve rapid, quantifiable business results (see above)
• Never-ending journey of learning, always more opportunities to innovate
• Fits with existing tools (e.g. Agile), but focuses their use to get business results
• Accelerates organizational learning and innovation
• Empowers employees and managers to deliver faster with less stress
• Frees up leadership bandwidth to focus on growth and strategy

2
 Lean Software Institute

Detailed Program Overview

Why the software industry is adopting Lean principles

• A brief history of Lean, from Toyota to industries worldwide

• Software industry trends: globalization, collaboration, components, just-in-time
• The Google phenomenon: can you compete against “Free, Perfect, Now”?
• Strengths and weaknesses of Agile methods, CMMI
• Overview of Lean principles and how they apply to software development

How to clearly see value and waste in products and processes

• What value looks like for the customer

• Identifying and classifying sources of waste
• Developing shared criteria to determine what adds value and what’s waste
• How to specify and quantify customer value
• Generating alternative solution ideas very quickly using the right participants
• Quantitatively benchmarking solution ideas to select what adds the most value

Beyond project management: learn to see what is really happening

• Learn how to build end-to-end value stream maps so everyone can:

o Understand how activities are linked
o Identify in-process inventory that’s piling up
o Quantify waste, wait times, inventory, and potential savings
o Objectively compare improvement opportunities for impact
o Avoid fixing local problems that aren’t real global bottlenecks

• Understand how to maximize success for value stream mapping:

o Deciding what value streams to map first
o Selecting the right team and setting expectations
o Information that should be collected beforehand
o Software/IT challenges in value stream mapping
o How to identify, quantify and track inventory
o How to determine the right level of detail
o How to deal with process variation, uncertainty, and complexity

• Product development and application development as a system:

o Process architecture – your value streams
o Product architecture – components and their interrelationships
o Organization architecture – from teams to enterprises
o Information architecture – specs and other critical information
o Social architecture – how we work and learn together
o How these five dimensions interact to cause problems

3
 Lean Software Institute

Executing faster with fewer defects

• Understand how to recognize, quantify, and remove flow obstacles caused by:
o Poor information quality and ineffective specifications
o Team organization and communication issues
o Capacity imbalances and bottlenecks
o Rework and defect repair
o Product design choices that slow down execution
o Poor synchronization between different functional areas
o Unproductive meetings and slow/poor decision-making

• Techniques for achieving schedule compression

o Identifying technology and market trade-offs early on
o Concurrent Set-Based Development
o Use of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) to analyze architecture complexity
o Architecting products to maximize implementation speed
o Improving reuse of components and design knowledge
o Designing collaborative workspaces for faster problem-solving

• Prioritizing and synchronizing work with demand – across the value stream
o Understanding the limits of planning and forecasting (Push approach)
o Quantify what your R&D capacity and demand look like now
o How to set up demand-driven (Pull) rather than plan-driven execution
o Combining Pull with milestone planning
o Integrating customer demand with technology-driven innovation

Achieving lasting improvements

• Building continuous reflection and learning into everything you do

o Identify opportunities for improvement
o Determine what to measure and how
o Use Lean techniques to develop breakthrough improvement ideas
o Monitor and quantify implementation progress
o Develop an improvement plan for every process and product

• Reorganize processes and specifications to minimize defects

o Use specifications that are quick and easy to write, read, and review
o Develop meaningful rules and checklists
o Use testing to speed decision-making during design and development
o Develop prevention strategies for common defect types

• Developing a learning-focused culture

o Critical characteristics of a learning-focused culture
o Cultures at best-in-class innovators like Google and Toyota
o Leadership do’s and don’ts from team leaders to executives
o Strategies for getting started with Lean in your organization

4
 Lean Software Institute

Speaker

The program will be taught by Frode L. Ødegård, the founder of

the Lean Software Institute. Frode has more than twenty years
of experience as a software entrepreneur and trusted advisor to
high-tech executives. Companies he has helped include Sony
Electronics Inc., Lockheed Martin, Candle, Conexant Systems,
Mindspeed, Cardinal Health, AT&T Wireless, and Plantronics.
Frode is currently writing a book on how Lean Thinking is
transforming the software industry.

Before founding the Lean Software Institute in 2004, Frode was

the CEO and founder of Ødegård Labs, Inc., a software
engineering research and consulting firm. Prior to founding Ødegård Labs in 1991, Frode
was the CEO and founder of Modula-2 CASE Systems A/S, a Norwegian company
building next-generation tools for embedded software developers.

Program schedule

Registration and breakfast opens at 8:30am, and we begin the seminar at 9am. The lunch
break is at noon, and there will be mid-morning and afternoon breaks as well. We will
end promptly at 5pm.

Registration and location

Attendance is strictly limited to only twenty participants to facilitate peer interaction, so

we recommend registering early! The seminar fee of $495 includes handouts, breakfast,
lunch, snacks, and beverages. An Early Bird discount of $100 applies if you register
before September 8, 2007.

To register for this seminar, visit our web page at http://www.leansoftwareinstitute.com.

For any questions about this event, please email events@leansoftwareinstitute.com or call
us at (858) 964-5133.

The program will be hosted by:

Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
12255 El Camino Real, Suite 300
San Diego, CA 92130

About the Lean Software Institute

Headquartered in San Diego, California, the Lean Software Institute was founded in 2004
to be the leading resource for Lean Management in the software industry. We help our
clients improve business performance through the implementation of Lean principles and
practices.