by Marshall Guillory
We often have challenges posed about the impossibility of using Lean-Agile ways of working, thinking, and feeling wrt hardware, firmware, and software solutions (complex cyber-physical systems). The focus of today’s discussion is the remarkable technology company with an economic-based mission, Wyze, which has a complex product portfolio, but only complicated individual products. They are an ongoing case study of mine.
If you dig into the details you will observe that they have a common and aligned architecture (“agile” – Architectural Runway) that spans across the product portfolio.
Full disclosure, yes, I own nearly all of their products too as a Wyze super fan. Including the Wyze scale, which is a lying little device that spews untruths at me every morning about my BMI.
Notice how they are using “Agile” to iterate on incremental potentially shippable product releases, on-demand. In this case, three new features showed up in the Wyze Cam Outdoor product this week. Apologies, I misspoke — this iteration.
Notably, the hardware increments are slower than the software increments. Which makes total sense. “Continuish integration.” Creating alignment across the different development value streams and the business is an important exercise in lean flow (Lean+DevOps+SAFe). This is why the knowledge from Lean is such an important part of the Scaled Agile Framework and also why DevOps adopted flow as one of the three ways.
The Challenge of Alignment
What challenges are you facing in your large cyber-physical systems? Do your value streams have the necessary critical alignment across hardware, firmware, and software teams?
Does your organization have a holistic view into all of your value streams? Is there awareness of flow and bottlenecks? Can you rationalize and produce the critical measures for your current context in flow, like lead-time for features? Or the speed of innovation?
#lean #flowframework #agile #development #productdevelopment #scaledagileframework #devops #valuestreammanagement