Lean Agility

Lean Agility helps knowledge workers and their leaders deliver better-quality work, faster, through more efficient processes and engaged people. Know-how, tools, and techniques drawn from the best of Lean, Agile/Scrum and Service Design thinking to work smarter not harder in an office and virtual environment. Making knowledge work - work better. We... believe that bad processes almost always beat good people, so we teach people how to see and take advantage of opportunities to improve processes specific to knowledge work so they are motivated and enabled to deliver products and services better. At the same time, the work becomes more interesting and engaging, charging not draining their batteries. It started with an urgent business problem. In 2002, the Royal Canadian Mint had encountered a string of losses and faced the threat of being sold or shut down. The CEO called our founder Craig (an employee at the time) into his office, asking him to improve the Mints performance appraisal system to help bring the organization back to profitability. The CEO said Im off on vacation for the next two weeks but I want your report on my desk when I return. Understanding that the appraisal process was part of the problem, but that poor processes were a much bigger cause, Craig and his team desperately researched process improvement, finding and reading the book Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones. It described several Lean turnarounds that almost exactly mirrored the challenges of the Mint at the time. Convinced that Lean was a great approach to the Mints biggest problems, Craig FedExed a copy of the book to the CEOs cottage in the Maritimes. A few days later, the CEO wrote back: Craig, Great book. Were going to do Lean. Im back on Monday. Youre in charge. Be ready! David. Craig and his team learned on the fly how to adapt the Lean approach to improve many different types of business processes. Within the first 12 months, the Mint returned to profitability for the first time in years. Harnessing the ingenuity of the people, ...Read More