ALE 2012 - Groundhog Day of a Team Leader

Lean thinking and Kanban usually approach an organisation from the executive or management level, but the people who are working in development and testing see things a bit differently. It takes a long journey until a developer feels the weight of an service level agreement, or understands the different prioritization methods. The team leader is the person who guides the developer and tester on their journey. In my presentation, I intend to show the team leader’s perspective of Lean thinking and its implementation.

Guiding a team in an organisation which follows the Lean principles isn’t that easy, especially as a team leader. Unfortunately, it isn’t enough to say that “ from now on, we are going to have a limit on the tasks in development phase… ”, because this is not enough. People need to get out of their comfort zones, they must understand the new principles and they must be more disciplined than in an agile environment. Additionally, the team leader should report to the management, and ensure that the Lean and/or Kanban transition will not have a bad effect on the organisation, for example missing delivery dates, or quality issues.

During the last five years, I’ve observed up several different interesting behaviour patterns and scenarios in what people did on their Lean journey. In my presentation, I’m going to show the most interesting ones together with the actions I took in order to save the situations (e.g. gemba walk, motivation techniques), and help my teams be better at their profession and be better Lean thinkers.

Uniquely, I’m also going to prepare several cases where I did wrong, like in the movie ‘Groundhog Day’. One have try over and over again until he or she finds the right path to follow.


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