Lean product development seeks to maximise business value whilst minimising waste, it is an evolution of the management discipline that originates from the Toyota Production System and their Just In Time manufacturing process.
Lean focuses on the entire value stream; from the initial concept through to realisation of business value, whereas agile processes focus only on optimising IT. Local optimisation within IT can be suboptimal for the value stream.
Lean maximises business value by matching demand to capacity and smoothing out the flow of work through a system. This allows teams to start completing work instead of just starting work. Read more about Lean Product Development and how IndigoBlue is pioneering the use of Lean processes into organisations that develop software systems.
Kanban for software development is the first real Lean IT process that has been proven to work in a range of industries across a wide range of scales.
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Today's highly competitive and rapidly changing markets that see the rise and fall of the likes of Nokia and MySpace places business imperatives on companies. In particular, companies need to be innovative, introducing new products, updating others to react to changes in the market (or predicting or even creating these market changes).