Towards the Lean Web Development Team

I've been reading "Lean Thinking". and at the same time, I'm trying to figure out how to put together a highly-functioning web-development team - I think there might considerable demand for one if one existed. Also, because I'm a consultant, I'm trying to figure out how I could take an existing web team and make it more like a highly functioning web development team. I wouldn't claim to be au fait with all the Lean terms, and as I've mentioned previously I still have some questions and doubts. So this is my first stab at this - any Lean gurus, please feel free to comment or correct.


I'm going to run a workshop in Bristol to investigate these ideas further. Because, obviously, these ideas are very much still in Beta, I'll run it at cost (about 50 pounds per seat). Let me know if you're interested in attending.

Lean Concept: Value Streams

The software is only one part of a website. Design, Marketing and PR integration. While there is almost always some custom software that needs to be written in a website of any complexity at all, the aim of the website is normally some kind of "human" goal, either a marketing goal, or a humanitarian goal. All sorts of value gets added to a website at many different points in its lifespan. A lot of this value is added after the website goes live and in an ongoing process.

Lean Concept: Multi-skilling, cross functional teams

It's not your skills. It's not your talent. It's the way you fell out of the Victorian hopper. The education system is still generating tradesmen who describe themselves as developers or designers or testers or project managers or salesmen (people from design agency backgrounds have a different set of titles).

Lean concept (my words, my gloss): Big pipes

Another thing that Toyota do is have high bandwidth communication with their customers (through a programme of visiting salesmen that encourages

Your first (last and only?) job is talking to your customers. How are you communicating with your customers? What aspects of that communication are valuable? How can they be increased? What aspects of communication with your customers is NOT valuable? How can that be decreased?

Your first (last and only?) job is talking to each other. If you can figure out how to communicate with each other and improve each other's skills and add value to each other's work you'll be in great demand.

How fat is your pipe? What's the fattest pipe you could give to your customer? What would the customer actually want i.e. to keep changing the design, to be able to add and remove complex features at the very last minute? Is it possible? Would your team have to work evenings, weekends, shifts? Could you organise yourselves to do that? How would you charge for it? How would you explain these charges to your customers?

Lean Concept: What is it?

One way of thinking about Taiichi Ohno, the guru behind the Toyota Production method is that he is the man who had the best understanding ever of what a factory is and what it produced.

What is your organisation? Think of some more metaphors? Hunting party? platoon? String quartet? Dance troupe? What are you making? Cakes? Cuckoo clocks? Spaceships? Fanzines? Architecture? You've got a metaphor. A model for what kind of organisation you work in, you've got a metaphor, a model for what it is you make. Are they the right ones?

Use the metaphor of an engine. What do the dashboard instruments measure? What are the dipsticks? What is visible? What should be visible? How does everybody in the team know how they're doing? How does the customer know how you're doing?

Lean Concept: Kanban, simple visual workflow ordering

Does it make sense to pull work through your organisation at the rate that it can be delivered at rather than pushing it through at the rate you win it? What things that weren't "wasteful" could your programmers and designers be doing while they were waiting for work?

Lean Concept: Waste - identifying it get rid of it

Where are you wasting your time? Overworking? Arguing? Using the wrong tools?

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)