Our panelists were all experienced Agilists who incorporate deep Lean thinking: Mary Poppendieck, Jim Shore, Alan Shalloway and Jean Tabaka.

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Mary led with a quick definition: “Lean is delivering constantly increasing customer value for continually decreasing effort, leveraging energy and creativity”. The panelists all agreed that Agile is really a subset of Lean.

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While Lean thinking can certainly improve the value flowing out an Agile team, its strong suit is in wider-scale application to the business and the whole value chain, “from concept to cash”. We have to pay attention to metrics that traditionally sat on the business side, as Agile lacks discipline around business methods. Teams must understand the business justification — and focus on delivering its promise.

Some people claim that “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”. But we manage things that we can’t measure all the time. …. Lean will help us improve stuff even if it’s not measurable.

Lean has us pay attention to throughput and value flow; it encourages having mechanisms for flow control. Agile’s mechanism is the iteration … Kanban’s mechanism is the work-in-progress (WIP) limit

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[the most common mistakes when implementing Lean?] Emphasizing practices over principles and culture; taking Scrum roles as gospel; not realizing the true nature of change (believing the only thing that needs to change are the programmers).

I was surprised by the panel’s answers to the question, “What should teams be trained in?” Jean answered: “Reflection” — so the team can even take in the rest of the training, and apply continuous improvement. The other three all said, “Writing testable code!” They all emphasized the point of having great technical skill and writing acceptance-driven, defect-free code.