When leaders in a company embark on the journey of agile and lean adoption, they usually do so with speed of development in mind. They say things like “Product development takes too long.” “How can we speed it up?” “If we lower development lead times we can get through this backlog.” “We know what to do, we just don’t do it quickly enough.”
They focus on “efficiency”, doing things with a minimum of effort and resources (including time). And they typically labor under the illusion that if they achieve a high enough efficiency, their entire backlog of work will get done and the business will hum along. This will never happen! It’s impossible.
People at organizations we work with are clever, creative, and inventive. They always have many ideas on how to improve existing products, create new products, adopt new business models, and so on. These ideas may not come easily. A good one may combine deep industry knowledge, technical skill, and customer insight, perhaps taking inputs from a whole team of people. Nevertheless, conceiving of these ideas is easier than implementing them, therefore the number of product ideas invariably outstrips the capacity to implement them. No increase in capacity due to rising efficiency will change this imbalance.
Given the abundance of ideas in the face of limited implementation capacity, implementing one idea will rule out implementing others. This trade-off is the central consideration, thus “effectiveness”, choosing the right things to do, becomes the dominant concern. No matter how efficient your organization is, you will always face the question of finding the right focus for that efficient effort, that is, choosing the right things to do.
Is efficiency important? Yes. Can agile and lean adoption improve efficiency? Yes. Will improved efficiency solve the problem of many ideas not being implemented? No. While many journeys to agile and lean adoption begin with a focus on efficiency, and reap benefits through improvement in efficiency, any successful adoption includes coming to grips with effectiveness as the dominant concern over efficiency.
Written by William Baxter
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