Best way to bring agility/improve delivery of multi-tasking teams

You can achieve that with Lean. Agile is more than that: Agile is to anticipate and to be ready for unexpected changes. I am in charge of implement Agile and the environment (to create any type of products) is highly distributed along the world virtual teams performing multi-tasking. So, here practical things. First, define your client. For us, client is the next in the process chain. Second, go to your clients to elicit what value mean for them. We do not use value today, we use benefit definition. Third, define quality and implement it into your process with focus on anticipation and diagnosis (quality assurance) not in fix and cure (quality control).

Zaheer,

You're right about theory vs practice, but I would try to move towards the "theory" as much as possible. You might have 3 customers that want to see progress on their projects, but if you can get your teams to stop multi-tasking and finish one project at a time, the final deliverable dates will not change. In fact, 2 of your projects will finish much sooner, and even your last project will probably finish earlier than promised.

This may come down managing stakeholder expectations. Perhaps it's too late to fix these 3 projects, but perhaps your organization could improve this going forward.

This is assuming your projects can be done sequentially without significant gaps in work. If you have dependencies between the projects, or if there are gaps in the work where your team is waiting, then they might have to switch between projects.

I don't know the specifics of your projects or organization, of course, but generally speaking, teams will perform faster if they can focus on one project at a time, and you will deliver faster to your customers.

Thank you Sergio, sure these tips can really help take forward the initiative. Just wondering one thing, however, don't you think by adopting lean, you already somehow start your agile journey? As the underlying foundation of lean and agile is based on almost the same principles.

When you implement Lean you gain into flexibility. Flexibility is "Be able to respond to
already-hypothesized situations.Being flexible leads to success when a predicted event occurs.". When you implement Agile you gain into agility. Agility is "Be able respond to a wide variety of unexpected external surprises and create external surprises.Being agile will assist businesses who face unpredictable circumstances.". Just to clarify, I am not saying that Agile is "best" than Lean. Both are important and you can implement both (that is the situation in my current work place where some places are running based on Lean).

Dear Sergio,

Thank you for sharing the valuable insights. So, the major difference between the two is, Lean focuses on hypothesized (likely to occur situations) vs Agile focuses on any unexpected change?