Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

John Seddon is a well-known "management guru", and bestselling author. John acknowledges the influence of W.E Deming and Taiichi Ohno on his work and today he describes what his consultancy firm, Vanguard, does as a combination of systems thinking – ‘how work works’, and intervention theory – ‘how to change it’.

Don Reinertsen is world-renowned for his work in the use of Lean in managing product development, going right back to 1983, when he first shot to the world's attention with some groundbreaking work that helped pioneer the "cycle-time reduction movement". Before this original work with McKinsey, Don gained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

We're often asked what we consider to be the difference between Lean and Agile, and if you ask 5 different people around our office, you'll get 5 different answers. (Actually, if you ask the same person 5 times you'll probably get 5 different answers - depending on who it is you're asking).

So we thought we'd state explicitly our views on the topic. Simply put, there is no difference between Lean and Agile.

Jim Highsmith was one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto (see previous post), and is recognised as being one of the leading practitioners and thinkers in the field of agile project management operating in the world today.

Jim suggests that software development is a moving target, and for project management methodologies to be successful, they need to be adaptive - very much the way we see agile project management methodology.