Lean/Agile

1 AlphaTechnologies Consulting is helping their clients answer these questions. Using Lean thinking principles, and Agile techniques, 1 AlphaTechnologies is successfully implementing SAP solutions while increasing their team’s productivity and efficiency, providing quality solutions quicker, and delivering high customer value to the business stakeholders.

Agile is an IT methodology, derived using Lean thinking. Essentially, Agile is ‘Lean’ in IT. It is the proven project management methodology that encourages:

• Frequent inspection and adaptation
• A leadership philosophy that encourages team work, self-organization and accountability
• A set of engineering best practices that allow for rapid delivery of high-quality projects
• A business approach that aligns development with customer needs and company goals

Agile project teams within a Lean organization provide the IT organization with the ability to be flexible and to respond to a changing business environment. This is usually one of the main challenges that face IT organizations that are using a waterfall methodology (such as the Accelerated SAP methodology – ASAP). Agile teams learn to:

• Make Customer Value Added work a priority
• Develop lighter, yet just as effective artifacts for Business Value Added work
• Use new techniques to shorten up Business Value Added activities
• Replace some of the Business Value Added artifacts with empirical evidence (such as having demos of work accomplished rather than completing status reports)
• Identify and simplify the ceremonial activities that we traditionally perform to stay viable/compliant/lawful, and
• Negotiate Non Value Added Work (Waste) completely out of a project