Toyota is well-known for their agile ways of doing things. They first coined the term “Customer First” and famously invented Kanban*, which is today one of the most popular software delivery practices. They’ve always been driven (pardon the pun!) to deliver the highest quality, in the shortest time, and the lowest cost.
This is close to my heart — the second car I drove was this affordable little beauty:
Nigel Thurlow, chief of Agile at Toyota, clarifies that lean != agile.
“You can be Lean without being Agile, and you can be Agile without being Lean. They are different, yet very complementary concepts…We recognize that simply making a group of people use Scrum does not create a great team, and when we involve multiple teams we find the challenges are amplified. Changing behaviors and teaching team skills is essential.” — Nigel Thurlow
Lean = delivering value in the most efficient way possible
Agile = being able to respond quickly to changing customer needs
Some key points I’ve gathered about how Toyota handles agile today:
- Collaborative teams of 5–6 people, co-located in dedicated work spaces
- Multi-team systems orchestrated through meta scrums and scrum-of-scrums
- Strong focus on eliminating bottlenecks
- Cynefin framework for decision making
- Codified and collaborative process for product backlog development
- High visibility of backlogs to senior stakeholders — love this!
- C-level executives are fully engaged and part of the process — this too!
*Kanban (看板), means signboard or billboard in Japanese, and “look at the board” in Chinese. It was developed by industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno as a scheduling system for lean manufacturing in order to improve efficiency.
