The Agile Enterprise: Agile & Lean Six Sigma - What We Keep and What We Don’t

The initial Agile Enterprise developed in manufacturing was tentative to replace or at least augment Lean Six Sigma practices with something new that would allow enterprises to adapt quickly to market demands. For decades, manufacturing was almost obsessed with quality, using statistical process control to achieve the incredible level of 2.4 defects per million of opportunities - in other words, processes in which 99.99966% of all opportunities to produce some feature of a part are statistically expected to be free of defects. Although incredible, this goal was achieved in manufacturing, where fixing a defect is not as easy as in software development. The software industry is nowadays at a 2 sigma level with a rework rate of 20-30%. Unsurprisingly, the 'new' Agile practices start 'borrowing' from Lean Six Sigma in an attempt to make Agile delivery more efficient. Safe, Kanban, and DevOps are only a few examples proving the new direction. Manufacturing chose to drop (part of) Lean Six Sigma to bring the flexibility needed to adapt, relaxing standardization in favor of innovation and agility. Project Managers should be the champions of mixing practices to ensure an optimal delivery.

Based on the presenter's experience as a practitioner, this webinar looks at Lean Six Sigma tools from a combined Agile and Project Management perspective, analyzing some of the challenges and opportunities of Lean Six Sigma in an Agile world.