Why is innovation an important pillar in the House of Lean?

This chapter is from the book 

While initially derived from Lean manufacturing,1 the principles and practices of Lean thinking as applied to software, product, and systems development are now deep and extensive. For example, Allen Ward,2 Don Reinertsen,3 Mary and Tom Poppendieck,4 Dean Leffingwell,5 and others have described aspects of the core principles and practices of Lean thinking using a product development context. In combination with these factors, we developed the SAFe House of Lean, inspired by the Toyota “House of Lean” and others.

Goal: Value

The roof of the house represents value. The goal is to deliver the maximum value in the shortest sustainable lead time, while providing the highest possible quality to customers and to society as a whole. High morale, emotional and physical safety, and customer delight are further goals with economic benefits.

Pillar 1: Respect for People and Culture

A Lean-Agile approach doesn’t implement itself or perform any real work. People do all the work. Respect for people and culture is a basic human need. People are empowered to evolve their own practices and improvements. Management challenges people to change and may help steer them toward improvement. However, the teams and individuals learn problem-solving and reflection skills and are accountable for making the appropriate improvements.

To evolve into a Lean organization, the culture will need to change substantially. For that to happen, the organization and its leaders must change first. And respect for people and culture should extend to relationships with suppliers, partners, customers, and the broader community. After all, they are key to the success of the enterprise.

When there is true urgency for change, improvements in culture will naturally occur. First, understand and implement SAFe values and principles. Second, deliver winning results. Changes to culture will surely follow.

Pillar 2: Flow

The key to successfully implementing SAFe is establishing a continuous flow of incremental value delivery based on continuous fast feedback and adjustment.

Continuous flow enables faster value delivery, effective built-in quality practices, constant improvement, and evidence-based governance.

The principles of flow are an important part of the Lean-Agile mindset. These include understanding the full value stream, visualizing and limiting Work in Process (WIP), and reducing batch sizes and managing queue lengths. Additionally, Lean focuses on reducing delays and eliminating waste, meaning activities that add no value.

Pillar 3: Innovation

Flow builds a solid foundation for the delivery of value. But without innovation, both the product and process will steadily decline. In support of innovation, Lean-Agile leaders must do the following:

• Understand and implement the Japanese concept of “Gemba.” It advises management to “get out of the office” and into the workplace. This is where value is actually produced and products are created and used. As Toyota’s Taiichi Ohno said, “No useful improvement was ever invented at a desk.”

• Provide a regular time and space for people to be creative. Time for innovation must be purposeful and become part of the natural development rhythm. SAFe’s Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration provides one such opportunity.

• Avoid the trap of focusing on the “tyranny of the urgent.” Innovation rarely occurs with 100 percent people utilization and constant firefighting.

• Apply innovation accounting.6 Establish nonfinancial, actionable metrics that provide fast feedback on the important elements of the solution’s new concepts, business model, and/or features.

• Validate innovations with customers and then pivot without mercy or guilt when the hypothesis needs to change.

Pillar 4: Relentless Improvement

The fourth pillar is relentless improvement. It guides the business to become a learning organization through continuous reflection and adaptation. A constant sense of competitive danger drives it to aggressively pursue improvement opportunities. Leaders and teams systematically do the following:

• Optimize the whole organization and the development process, not just parts

• Consider facts carefully and then act quickly

• Apply Lean tools and techniques to determine the root cause of problems, and apply effective countermeasures quickly

• Reflect at key milestones to openly identify and address process shortcomings at all levels

Foundation: Leadership

The foundation of Lean is leadership, the key enabler for team success. The ultimate responsibility for the adoption and success of the Lean-Agile paradigm lies with the enterprise’s managers, leaders, and executives. To be successful, leaders must be trained in these new and innovative ways of thinking and exhibit the principles and behaviors of Lean-Agile leadership.

The basic premise to develop the Scaled agile framework is to enable organizations to scale up agile development practices to enterprise scale. One of the key constructs upon which SAFe® is built upon is the ‘Lean-Agile Mindset’. This is defined as ‘the combination of beliefs, assumptions and actions of SAFe® leaders and practitioners who embrace the concepts of the Agile Manifesto & Lean Thinking’.

Agile provides the thinking and mindset related to achieving high levels of efficiency, productivity, collaboration, team motivation and quality. However, the agile principles work well in the delivery of smaller, less complex solutions rather than applying it to enterprise wide solution implementations. Scaled agile framework requires a wider array of knowledge, skills, leadership and a change in mindset to adopt and apply lean agile principles.

Aspects of Lean-Agile
The lean-agile mindset in SAFe® is built upon 2 main constructs. These provide the knowledge and help drive the skills required to create and manage the culture, organizational structure, leadership and management approach required to drive organizations adopting SAFe® and to allow them business objectives. The two key aspects of lean-agile mindset are-

Lean Thinking which is primarily defined through SAFe®’s ‘House of Lean’ which was derived from Lean manufacturing inspired by Toyota’s ‘Houses of Lean’. This was then applied to software products and solutions development.

The end goal of any project, however big or small is to deliver value to its stakeholders. The roof of the house is thus represented by delivering value in the shortest possible time ensuring maximum possible quality. 

Some of the principal pillars hold up the house of lean. They represent respect for people & culture, flow, innovation and relentless improvement to support the end goal of value delivery.

Work in any project is carried out by people and thus the respect for people and culture becomes utmost important for any team. Team together face challenges, learn new techniques and skills, solve problems and move forward and make improvements to projects and processes. Managers generally challenge the status quo and empower people to achieve more. The motivator behind this behavior is the team culture. Organizations and leaders must first embrace this culture and then try to instill that in their staff and even beyond organization’s boundaries towards other external stakeholders. It is important to note that culture cannot be changed overnight but can only be molded over time.

The 2nd pillar of flow refers to a continuous flow of work to support incremental delivery of value. One main objective of an agile project is to make small increments to the solution over time and to keep on adding business value through continuous delivery. This must also be done while improving on engineering practices, improvements to solution quality and project governance through proper tracking. Visualizing the flow is an important aspect in Agile and in Lean. We all know about the Scrum and Kanban boards in agile projects and how they created visibility of project progress. This same concept must be scaled up with more visibility of tasks, components, modules and even systems with emphasis given to identifying and reducing non-value adding activities. Continuous delivery through DevOps and SysOps through the automation of software engineering, QA and deployment practices thus becomes a pivotal capability for any organization.

Innovation is a key pillar in the house of lean and is placed in the middle. No team or organization can be improve or continuously deliver value without innovation. Thus SAFe® encourages team to challenge the norm, continuously explore new frontiers, be creative and move out of their comfort zones. Innovation and Planning sprints are thus a key component in the SAFe® hierarchy.

The 4th pillar is to relentlessly improve the product and the processes. Organizations are expected to be learning through review and retrospectives. 

The foundation of the house of lean is Leadership. Leadership plays a key enabler role for team success and successful adoption and implementation of lean-agile approach depends with the organization’s executive leadership, managers and team leads.

Embracing Agility is the 2nd construct in lean-agile. SAFe® is built upon skills, capabilities and aptitude of teams and their leaders. The agile manifesto for software development describes the principles and practices related to carrying out project activities in an agile manner. 
The agile manifesto describes 4 values and 12 principles. Agile values motivates teams to focus more on- 

•  Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
•  Working software over comprehensive documentation
•  Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
•  Responding to change over following a plan

Agile motivates teams to be self-organizing and self-healing, to face problems as one single unit, collaborate and solve problems and to continuously build something that can be demonstrated to customers. The objective is to get feedback as soon as possible and make necessary changes as required. The requirement in SAFe® is to apply these same set of values at team level as well as among multiple or large scale teams.

SAFe® provides the basis for organizations to plan and build enterprise class applications and that too in an agile manner. It provides organizations with the processes and principles required to successfully apply these practices. The lean-agile values provides the platform for organizations to build their practices on and provides a organized approach to manage and thrive in chaos.