Intro
Newsletter
Welcome to the latest Lean and Agile newsletter. I have been deep in research in Crypto and NFTs and applying lean thinking to them. Some content will be coming shortly but below is my latest purchase by an artist I saw in a Twitter space the other night and the person who created Nyan Cat https://twitter.com/PRguitarman?s=20 bought 2 of them! I bought a Cartmen one and this masked one I thought it was appropriate (or at least I thought it was a mask). Maybe have a look a cheap entry to NFT and who knows! https://opensea.io/collection/mr-pixel-nft
Andy Sandford
Local government improvement - We are Lean and Agile
We run our regular fortnightly Success Labs sessions for our users (sign up here). In a recent customer survey, the feedback we are getting most is that customers want to hear other customer stories. I was delighted to be sent a link to this excellent podcast with Paul Shepherd, Founder and CEO of We Build Bots, with Kay O’Flaherty, Head of Service for Digital at Wrexham County Borough Council. Kay describes her role in Wrexham as “Continuously improving services using data and business intelligence and changing the culture of the organisation”. Kay has worked with us and the Engage Process software at both her current role and also in her previous role at Teignbridge Council.
weareleanandagile.com
News
The Exponential Age will transform economics forever | WIRED UK
IN 2020, AMAZON turned 26 years old. Over the previous quarter of a century, the company had transformed shopping. With retail revenues in excess of $213bn (£150bn), it was larger than Germany’s Schwarz Group, America’s Costco and every British retailer. Only Walmart, with more than half-a-trillion dollars of sales, was bigger. But Amazon was by far and away the world’s largest online retailer. Its online business was about eight times larger than Walmart’s. Amazon was more than just an online shop, however. Its huge businesses in areas such as cloud computing, logistics, media and hardware added a further $172bn in sales.
wired.co.uk
Collaboration Overload Is Sinking Productivity
Collaborative work — time spent on email, IM, phone, and video calls — has risen 50% or more over the past decade to consume 85% or more of most people’s work weeks. The Covid-19 pandemic caused this figure to take another sharp upward tick, with people spending more time each week in shorter and more fragmented meetings, with voice and video call times doubling and IM traffic increasing by 65%. Read more here
hbr.org
Local Digital Fund Round 5 - Local Digital
The Local Digital Fund is open for applications from council-led digital projects The Local Digital Fund aims to help councils transform their digital services in line with the Local Digital Declaration. Now open for its fifth round of funding, we are inviting local authorities to submit proposals in two thematic areas: development platforms and software.
localdigital.gov.uk
Events
Business Analysis Conference Europe – a Virtual Conference Business Analysis Conference Europe - IRM UK, produced in collaboration with the IIBA UK and BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
21-22 September (Conference) 20 & 23 September (Workshops)
The Business Analysis Conference Europe provides an unparalleled learning and networking opportunity for Business Analysts from across Europe and beyond. The conference provides an interactive forum where Business Analysts can virtually meet, discuss and debate how best to rise to the challenges faced by their organisations today and in the future.
irmuk.co.uk
Sign up to the Lean Enterprise Institute Free Webinar
Building Lean Leaders—and High-Performance Organizations—with Hoshin Kanri and Executive-Led Problem-Solving Description Studies show that two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to implement their strategies. Common causes of failure are poor alignment across functions and inability to drive high-level objectives to the front-line work.
Hoshin kanri, also called strategy deployment, is a method for ensuring alignment around strategic objectives across functions and driving progress toward those objectives at every level within a company.
zoom.us
Design Thinking
The Design Thinking and Lean Startup Models Are Broken. Here Is the Innovation Vortex! | by Jurgen Appelo | Medium
Before I plant my feet firmly on some sensitive, long toes in the Design Thinking and Lean Startup communities, let me start on a positive note. I love the ideas in Design Thinking and Lean Startup! Getting out of the building, empathizing with users, developing prototypes, running experiments, and doing it all in rapid feedback cycles, it makes total sense to me. No problemo. Count me in! In fact, I teach and discuss all of that in my Shiftup workshops. However, it is time for some improvements because the popular models are broken. There are three-and-a-half issues I’d like to fix.
medium.com
Ideas
What is ‘governance as a service’? | by Richard McLean | Medium
Governance is often seen as a burden or a series of hurdles to get over.
Sound familiar? But it needn’t be like that. It can be a service. To make that happen where you work, start by identifying who uses the service. And then speak to them. Try to understand what they need from governance. Experiment by making changes to remove pain points so that the service better meets their needs. Get their feedback. Learn from failure. Repeat.
medium.com
Video
(162) The Pitfalls Of Process Mapping And How To Avoid Them - YouTube
Mapping out a process “as is” is a standard part of process improvement efforts. It looks pretty simple but there are some pitfalls. In this video we look at the most typical ones and how to avoid them. The most common error in process mapping is diving into improving the process before you have finished mapping it
youtube.com