Companies are often confused between lean vs agile, spending a lot of time thinking which approach to use for optimizing their processes. Both approaches have their own methodologies and frameworks, with significant overlaps and differences.
In this article, we discuss the important differences and similarities between the two approaches and show how the best option is to use both lean and agile for the brightest outcomes that directly translate to higher customer satisfaction levels, improved quality, and reduced costs.
What is Lean?
Lean is a powerful methodology that helps to identify and eliminate waste in processes to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and boost productivity. Wastes don’t add any value to the end user of the product or service. Wastes can take many forms like incomplete work, defects, switching between tasks, waiting times, etc.
Lean helps deliver products and services to customers in the fastest manner possible to achieve higher customer satisfaction levels. Lean focuses on the functioning of teams and the organization as a whole.
What is Agile?
Agile is a project management approach that breaks a project down into several phases and helps manage them in a better way. Agile, at its very core, is based on continuous iteration for improvement. Agile involves small cycles to make constant improvements.
The focus is on small units and on building them. Once that’s done, feedback is sought and the whole cycle is repeated for betterment. Agile is centered on collaboration and encourages team meetings.
Lean vs Agile: What Are The Differences?
There are several similarities between lean and agile. Both are highly flexible approaches that aim to improve quality. Lean focuses on improving processes to deliver higher value to customers while agile works to create small iterations for better products.
Lean teams deliver products without waste, with faster delivery being a key focus. Agile teams create small units and seek customer feedback, which is used to improve the offerings.
Agile places significant importance on collaboration between team members including designers, developers, and customers. Lean focuses on the final product delivered to the customer.
Lean traces its roots to the manufacturing sector while agile has been used for continuous delivery and improvement in software environments.
Agile is more likely to pick projects that are innovative and need to adapt to new changes.
Lean and Agile: The Best of Both Worlds
If you’re having a hard time with lean vs agile, know that organizations should ideally be using a combination of both lean and agile for maximum productivity and waste reduction.
Lean and agile have many similarities and can work hand in hand seamlessly to create a people-focused culture. Both approaches can be used in diverse sectors from manufacturing to software development and focus on delivering the final products to customers in a timely manner with constant iterations to improve the offerings.
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