Mary Poppendieck (Leading Lean Software Development) never heard the term waterfall while working at 3M:
We always had developers understand their customers and test every bit of code as they wrote it. The first time I heard about this thing called “waterfall,” it was prescribed by a contract for the State of Minnesota, and I couldn’t figure out how it could possibly work. Actually, it didn’t work very well at all, and I decided it was a rather strange way to develop software. So I decided to write a book, taking ideas from Lean Manufacturing and applying them to software development.
Lean is from manufacturing, but many of the ideas carry over to other fields with little modification:
Well, Lean works for banking, which is a service business. Svenska Handelsbanken is a bank in Sweden that has been using Lean principles for 25 years. It puts the bank in a position to deal with discontinuous change in the financial markets by expecting local teams to make independent decisions. By having many individual teams seeing what opportunities are out there and responding, the bank stays ahead of changes in the markets.Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, also believes in small, independent teams; he calls them two-pizza teams. A two-pizza team is the number of people that can be fed with two pizzas. Amazon’s cloud is a service-oriented architecture in which each service is owned by a two-pizza team. The team is responsible for the service from cradle to grave: determining what is needed, development, operations, support — everything.
Toyota is the same; teams of six to eight people, with good mentoring from their manager, get work done better and faster.
An underlying concept of Lean is that if you can’t create small independent-thinking teams, you can’t respond rapidly in the face of continuous change. So you need to create a governance structure that allows the teams to make the right decisions and makes it possible for them to focus on the outcomes of the ultimate customer.
(Hat tip to Kevin Meyer at Evolving Excellence.)