Lean Application Development starts with Great Business Relationships
I was reading a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled Applying Lean to Application Development and Maintenance this morning.
They do a nice job of identifying the waste in many Application Development process efforts.
As I was reading the chart, it struck that one way to reduce or eliminate much of this waste is by forging strategic alliances with your business partners.
As you look at the activities identified as wasteful, they all stem from the "throw the I.T. development request over the transom" mentality - which arises from businesses with an "arms length" relationship with their own I.T. resources.
If you think about it, many of the same challenges would exist if you were trying to teach a blind man to drive a car! There would be frequent stops and abrupt starts. Turning the car would be fraught with peril, including frequent visits to the shoulder of the road. Priorities would be misunderstood. (Turn right. No - the OTHER right!). I suspect the journey would be frightening and would definitely take a long time - just like Application Development.
However, with an experienced, sighted driver - one who knows the destination, can see the road ahead, understands and interprets the road signs, can adapt to changing conditions (traffic, weather, road construction), the journey can be made successfully.
One of the first things a company can do when implementing lean manufacturing, is reorganize the plant floor, making sure that the equipment and processes are setup in a way that enable, support and optimize manufacturing flow.
The I.T. equivalent is adapting your organizational structure to better align your I.T. resources with their (functional) business counterparts. The closer the relationship you can develop with your business peers, the better your mutual understanding of the challenges, the better visibility into business priorities, the clearer the roadmap.
And you will have taken a giant step towards lean Application Development.
This isn't the entire answer, but it's a good place to start.
