When Eric Ries published his iconic book The Lean Startup in 2008, the principles and concepts he described quickly became a movement that swept through the tech world. Silicon Valley companies Intuit and Dropbox publicly adopted it as their product development mantra; Harvard and UC Berkeley began teaching classes on Lean Startup principles; and even the Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States, Steven VanRoekel, said he was taking a lean startup approach to government.
But in the minds of most people Lean Startup was exclusively a tech phenomenon - until GE adapted it. With the implementation of the FastWorks program, GE applied Lean Startup principles to the design and manufacture of the Monogram line of kitchen appliances.
According to the Harvard Business Review’s Brad Power: “The results GE Appliance has achieved so far are striking: half the program cost, twice the program speed, and currently selling over two times the normal sales rate.”
If GE, a 100-year old manufacturing company with roots in the industrial revolution, was applying these Lean Startup concepts, then why couldn’t we?
When I joined Softtek in 1987 there were only about 20 of us. From the get-go we had the startup culture running through our veins. Today, there are more than 10,000 of us and as a business technology services organization we are always trying to find ways to provide more value to our customers - to ‘wow’ them on a daily basis. Six Sigma, Lean, ITIL and CMMI quality frameworks alone don’t cut it for today’s cutthroat times – we needed something different to reconnect with our entrepreneurial spirit.
We decided to return to our roots with a program called RunLean, in order to instill a more agile, client-centric mindset as part of our operational culture.
Applying RunLean Internally
To get back to our lean, entrepreneurial core, we sent a smallish team of about 30-40 engineers to a Lean Startup workshop at internationally recognized university Tec de Monterrey. That was a great start, but our biggest challenge was to use this team to spread lean thinking throughout the organization.
We decided to hold a series of RunLean workshops to teach these principles, a task that was easier said than done. We realized we were straddling that middle ground between our new lean ideas and our traditional mindset. Our default traditional thinking would have put the launch of our first workshop a year from then. We would have been delayed by seeking budget approvals from every manager and VP; we would have also gotten mired in detailed planning that took too long.
Instead, we challenged our team to launch as quickly as possible. They released the first workshop in less than six weeks.
Applying RunLean With Our Customers
Implementing RunLean internally was an important first step – but we’re a services company, and client engagements are our lifeblood. The important next phase was to implement RunLean on projects that impacted our clients.
One of the first projects was called App Installation, a solution to the typical applications installation challenges and makes the process effortless for our clients. We take the software, the infrastructure and the install notes and deliver a working application with its installation documentation.
We were working on site for one of our clients, a multi-billion-dollar Fortune financial services company. Our team noticed the client was struggling with a very inefficient application installation process for their financial applications. The client experienced waste in resource usage, they lacked the required skills, and were beset by poor testing documentation.
Traditionally our team members would have just kept working on the project they were assigned to without making waves. But after attending our RunLean workshops they felt empowered to practice what they had just learned and proposed a new solution to the client.
And the end result was beautiful. The Softtek team replaced a complex process with a simple solution to solve their immediate pain. The client was very happy as we had found a simple yet elegant way to solve the client’s problem in a fraction of the time it would have normally taken.
Conclusion
Lean Startup principles are not just for Silicon Valley software startups. The hypothesis – test-iterate process inherent in Lean Startup works just as well for manufacturing companies (GE’s FastWorks) as well as software consulting companies.
It works for the development and launch of our own products, services and processes and new, innovative ideas; and it helps us to become more proactive and efficient in developing and delivering client solutions.
But it started with fostering a culture of transformation to lead by example, and then turning from an inward focus to an outward focus to help our clients increase their enterprise agility. The process wasn’t rocket science: we took action, and made it happen. Now I invite you to join us in our RunLean journey!
