Lean and agile entrepreneurship

We consult companies on introducing leanintrapreneurshipas well as developing new products and business models using the lean methodology. We also provide companies with concepts of agile leadership.

The vast majority of planned new products fail in the market. It is therefore much easier to manage an already extant product line than setting up a new one. The answer to the dilemma of the failure of most new products has, in the recent decade, given rise to a set of new methodologies and recommendations with a goal to drasticallyreduce business and market risks. At the same time, these methodologies make it possible to adapt even quicker to the ever-changing market conditions. We are, of course, talking about lean and agile methodologies.

LEAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The methods of lean entrepreneurship call for immediate inclusion of potential customers into the process of development through customer interviews and experiments, regular validation of market hypotheses, agile development in fast iterationsand the ability to quickly adapt to the needs of the market and the customers themselves.

The use of lean entrepreneurship (lean startup, lean production) among start-ups as well as large companies and other organizations –that is to say, everywhere a new product is being developed under extremely uncertain conditions – is growing and becoming a standard.

We aid companies in acquiring lean methods of product development with the goal to expand their product portfolio with goods and services that the customers would actually desire. Many enterprises, being careful with their expenses, tend to think that they operate with lean, yet this is not lean’s core tenet. The point of lean entrepreneurship is to acquire an expedient understanding of customers and their difficulties.

Lean methods are composed of the following activities, tools and steps:

  • Defining the vision and the answer to “Why?”
  • preparing canvases (frameworks), putting down hypotheses and iterating those hypotheses;
    • problem-solution canvas,
    • leanframework (product-market canvas),
    • business framework,
  • strategy and framework for making and testing hypotheses;
  • preparing interviews for discovering new customers and looking for early adopters;
  • setting the “innovation accounting” metrics for monitoring the progress;
  • transitioning from the research phase to the execution phase;
  • setting up an agile project management; other similar tools

AGILE MANAGEMENT

Today, the business environment is subject to constant change; it has, in fact, become entirely unpredictable. As a consequence, long-term planning has become extremely difficult to the point of impossibility.

Business plans need to be continuously reviewed and adapted to the market conditions, taking customer feedbackinto account. The volatility requires fast, responsive action, which must entail quality, data-based decision making. Agile management comes with a new set of tools to meet challenges such as these.

We help companies to introduce principles of agile methods of management and leadership, which originate in adapting concepts of software development via the SCRUM method. Here are some examples of concepts of agile leadership that we help to bring about in enterprises:

  • shaping self-organized teams and clearly defining the roles,
  • preparing and grooming task backlog,
  • recording the activities in the shape of user stories,
  • performing regular weekly sprints,
  • visualizing the work on a Kanban board,
  • introducing daily coordinative meetings (daily standups– 15 minutesin the morning),
  • retrospective meetings for continuous team improvement,
  • using tools like Jira to support agile managementetc.

The process comes equipped with all the tools, suggestions, documents and know-how necessary to execute agile product development or to deploy agile management in a professional and fault-free manner.