Lean-Agile Software Development for improving Corporate Sustainability

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Lean-Agile Software Development for improving Corporate Sustainability

Gaurav Dhooper

@gauravdhooper(pal-i®,pmi-acp®,safe4®,csm®,lss-gb)

January 9, 2023

Project Management

266

"A business that makes nothing, but money is a poor business" - Henry Ford

Every business wants to be profitable which is a reasonable ask. The profitability is long lasting when corporate sustainability is ingrained in the DNA of the organization delivering continuous and long-term stakeholder value. The three pillars of corporate sustainability around environmental, social and economic factors help in reducing carbon footprint or conserving energy or even reducing wasteful practices leading to happier employees, satisfied customers and strong community. It also helps in maintaining honest and transparent accounting practices along with regulatory compliance.

In the context of software development process, it includes the fast-evolving technology part to reduce the labor-intensive work through automation and bring efficiency, effectiveness, accuracy and consistency in the processes. The traditional development methods are unidirectional (initiation to go-live) with each subsequent phase having dependency on the preceding phases. This type of development methodology works best where the requirements are fixed and there is very less or almost no experimentation required in terms of tools, technologies and deliverables.

Lean and Agile principles adopted in the software development process brings enough flexibility and adaptability in the delivery approach, helps in improving the flow and allows experimentation to learn and continuously deliver value in a collaborative environment. The eighth principle of Agile manifesto states “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”

Adopting agile techniques enable rapid, iterative prototyping of new products by cross-functional teams and helps in improving the innovation rate through human-centered design process and retrospection sessions in the sprints. To navigate through uncertainty, volatility and unprecedent times which the world faced due to pandemic it requires sustainability to be at the center of businesses along with the people.

Delivering software incrementally instead of all at once reduces the risk of building something unwanted and allows the team and stakeholders to review, use the developed, shippable and releasable features, provide feedback and measure their benefits. Incremental development also helps in building a steady pace (neither too fast nor too slow) in the delivery cycle leading to improved predictability and adaptability. DevOps is one such culture allowing continuous integration (CI) of the source code and continuous delivery (CD) allowing automating build, test, configuration and deployment of new code from build to production environment. CD is inherited from lean principles which optimizes the process time and keep the prod environment up-to-date and, thus, eliminating the idle time. As a result of DevOps implementation, it is now possible to integrate people, process and technology in the planning, development, delivery and operations of applications.

The important strategies for the corporate sustainability include Innovation and Technology, Collaboration, Process Improvement and Sustainability Reporting.

Innovation and Technology - The key driver for innovation is the collaborative experimentation culture which is supported by Agile mindset irrespective of any implementation framework. Technology is a key enabler for building an innovation ecosystem and research is a fundamental building block of the idea development process. Any new business idea generation is not complete unless it is incubated, implemented and commercialized. Adoption of cloud helps enterprises in becoming more agile due to its elasticity and flexibility as per the demand and workloads. For example, you can increase or decrease the node cluster as your requirements change i.e., scaling up or scaling down.

Collaboration - The third value of Agile Manifesto focuses more on customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Involvement of the customer and regular feedback loop during Sprint Review are very important as they help in continuous improvement and encourages consensus-driven decisions. It also helps in building self-managed cross-functional teams and improved quality of software through early defect detection and test-driven development by writing the unit test cases prior to writing the real code.

Process Improvement - The lean principle of Continuous Improvement (Kaizen) seeks to improve every process in the company by removing non-value added activities, focusing on value added activities and balancing the value-enabling activities needed for regulatory compliance. Sustainability requires that the processes be continuously improved and simplified and not carved in stone. The processes are created to bring uniformity in the outcomes and sustained value is accomplished through transparency, inspection and adaptation on the foundation of trust.

Sustainability Reporting - “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” - Peter Drucker! The main purpose of sustainability reporting is to provide transparency on the company’s contribution to sustainable development for communicating environmental performance and impact. For example, Agile reporting helps agile teams with greater visibility on various metrics and should not be imposed by management; but agile teams should voluntarily use and communicate to learn, measure and improve. Improving organizational performance is also iterative and incremental in nature as small improvement experiments can be quickly run. The improvements made with actual outcomes can be measured repeatedly to understand how far or how close you are from achieving the project and organizational goals.

Corporate sustainability is no longer an option; but an imperative as it helps in transforming the entire value chain. In software development, lean-agile practices help in building sustainable solutions, maintaining the development cadence and releasing on demand to create a continuous flow of value to its customers and stakeholders. Since lean-agile practices are derived from Agile manifesto and Lean thinking it helps in building a mindset which promotes both pragmatism and empiricism.

Agile software development Lean Six Sigma corporate sustainability

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Gaurav Dhooper

Assistant Vice President, PMO

Strategic thinker, seasoned Project/Program management professional, Agile IT Delivery/ PMO Leader, author and a keynote speaker at various global platforms. Areas of interest include Digital Transformation & Strategy, establishing Strategic Partnerships and implementing Agile ways of working. An avid writer and has authored many articles on Digital Transformation, Agile Transformation, Agile Project Management, Scrum, Project Management Offices and Hybrid Project Management. Has been reviewer for PMI’s Standard for Earned Value Management, Standard for Program Management and a book on Agile Contracts. Holds the voluntary positions of President of PMO Global Alliance India Hub and Senior Official of IAPM for Noida. An active volunteer and member of PMI. Works with Genpact as Assistant Vice President, Business Risk Management PMO (Program Management Office).