SE-Radio Episode 234: Barry O’Reilly on Lean Enterprise
Johannes Thönes talks to Barry O’Reilly, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about his recently published book Lean Enterprise. A lean enterprise is a large organization that manages to keep innovating while keeping its existing products in the market. O’Reilly talks about the idea of scientific experiments and the build-measure-learn loop popularized by the lean-startup method. He shares his experiment of an online wine seller using Twitter. He further discusses the challenges for enterprises trying to do something similar and introduce the three-horizon model, to manage innovative, growing, and new products. As an example of a successful lean enterprise, O’Reilly talks about GOV.UK, the British government’s new website.
Venue: London
Related Links
- Barry O’Reilly’s blog http://barryoreilly.com
- Barry O’Reilly on Twitter http://twitter.com/barryoreilly
- Lean Enterprise http://barryoreilly.com/lean-enterprise
- Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale http://amzn.com/1449368425, by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O’Reilly
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses http://amzn.com/0307887898, by Eric Ries
- GOV.UK http://www.gov.uk
- Intuit https://www.intuit.com
- SnapTax http://turbotax.intuit.ca/tax-software/snaptax.jsp
- The three-horizon model http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/enduring_ideas_the_three_horizons_of_growth
- Software Engineering Radio Episode 221: Jez Humble on Continuous Delivery http://www.se-radio.net/2015/02/episode-221-jez-humble-on-continuous-delivery
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Tags: improvement kata, innovations, lean enterprise, lean startup, organizations, scaling agile
Very interesting program, clearly very impressive to learn how some of the leading organizations in the IT world work.
Regarding the potential risks and/or downsides, my instincts are that if you make that volume of change, you need to have excellent infrastructure and processes. Otherwise the environments could become chaotic and hard to debug?
In Episode 216 Adrian Cockcroft describes how Netflix had to implement microservices to support this sort of development pattern i.e. continuous delivery with multiple small releases per day.
Fantastic interview! I really found the examples very useful, and the analogies were fantastic. Thanks for doing this!
Great episode. It greatly exceeded my expectations. The whole three horizons of growth discussion was very interesting. It made me realize that my own organization is obsessed with the first horizon and gives no thought to the others. I loved that the interviewer at a certain point just asked Johannes point blank “how do you know this stuff and why should we believe you?”. I was a little disturbed by the wine experiment. It seemed like there were some ethical issues that were just breezed over. I suppose experiments like this are going on all the time at places like amazon. It seems like there are some special issues with lean/agile in large organizations which were not discussed. Agile is very much a an empowering bottom up kind of philosophy. In my own organization lean initiatives come from the top and by the time they get to my level are reduced to formulaic procedures.
It disappointing to hear your sentiments and experience of ‘Agile’ being an employee led initiative and ‘Lean’ being a top down used to control what and how people work.
In our experience true high performance organizations don’t use processes and methodologies to control people – be it agile, lean or otherwise.
Leaders understand their role is to create an environment where teams are free to experiment themselves to find out what methods, tools and techniques work best for them, in their context and the problems they are trying to solve. This is the very essence of freedom but with responsibility. Teams simply cannot go off and do what they want. They need boundaries. If they want freedom to choose they must take responsibility for those choices and work with leadership to know where those boundaries are.
High performance organisations know that feedback cycles need to exist between those leading the direction of the business and those driving the delivery. Ultimately strategy is informed by the learning and knowledge gained by those performing the work as they aim to move towards the desired target condition for business.
If open, transparent and honest information does not move around the organisation it will always result in poor decision being made. If the data being used to make decisions is incorrect or poor quality, it does not matter what methodology you use you will never achieve the desired outcome.
Very interesting episode, it exceeded my expectations as well. I have heard that some organizations are implementing Lean Enterprise from the top down, resulting in cutbacks, causing Lean Enterprise to have a a bad reputation already. The version of Lean Enterprise in this episode however, was very interesting and made me think about innovation in my daily projects.
Great episode with valuable insights and understanding by Barry