One traditional way of looking at Software Development is that the development organisation delivers software within a development project. The solution is then maintained and operated in some way during its life cycle. Withe one or more larger change projects happening during the life-cycle.
Looking at the value stream and the principles of lean, the lean organization aims at reducing the cycle time from the need/request of feature until it is in production. Moving focus to features (and we only do the features that provide the highest value right?) we reduces a lot of waste partially done work, extra features etc etc.
In a larger enterprise, with many different processes and also many different sysetms, the need comes from the business in the process improvements rather than in syftem improvements. Well this is just plain old SOA, or?
Looking at SCRUM; you have the product owner and the product backlog. Where the product backlog is an prioritized list of the most valuable featuresets for that solution.
From a business perspective, moving from a system backlog to a process backlog, and the development company/partner/department/team is responsible for eliminating backlog items as effectively as possible. Software development can be a more natural part in business improvements instead of just delivering software.
For me, this aligns very well with what I consder to be Lean.
So my question are, are there any process backlogs available? Anyone having experiences of this? I
/ Johan Nordin
Johan Nordin's Weblog 