Lean Agility and the Public Sector

Over the last 12 months, the Digital Advisory arm of Kainos has been growing, as more and more expert consultants join our team to help deliver advice and solve problems for our clients.

One problem we hear about repeatedly from is the difficulties they face of delivering the right thing at pace, and how they struggle to maximise their efficiency. Typical red flags we see when beginning to understand why clients are struggling to deliver effectively are:

• Evergreen delivery, without an end product or a product nobody uses as opposed to delivering units of quantifiable value
• Lacking prioritisation, everything in-flight at the same time
• Stalling development with poor delivery confidence and large gaps between releases
• Traditional long-term funding cycles requiring detail which is not reconciled with near-term agile planning and responsive delivery
• Ineffective management information so decision making is made on gut feel and not firmly tied to desired business outcomes
• Siloed pockets of various stages of Agile adoption /maturity and effectiveness

Within Kainos our belief was that by introducing Lean-Agility Management we could scientifically remove waste & inefficiency whilst Increasing delivery confidence, employee job satisfaction and visibility of the work being undertaken. As such we. introduced a lightweight and straightforward Lean-Agility approach that could be adopted across multiple portfolios.

Our approach does not just focus on Agile coaching (although that’s part of it) or other isolated elements of a transformation, but on 4 distinct pillars: Lean-Agility Management, Lean-Analytics & Dashboarding, Product & Design Coaching and Agile Coaching & Architecture. This gives us the opportunity to build sustainability and inhouse expertise to continue this journey.

Recently we’ve been working with an integrated energy super-major to help them improve in several of these key areas. We were asked to help, whilst contributing to the wider Agility transformation by bringing consistent high standards in delivery culture and ways of working through Lean and Agility.

The results have delighted the client; we have managed to improve delivery speed by over 70%, delivery confidence by more than 50% and job satisfaction by over 20%.

This approach is one we’re using with several other clients in the commercial sector, all with similar positive effects; but it’s not something we encounter being used within the Public Sector much; either by us, or by other consultancies.

But that is not to say this approach cannot work in the Public Sector; several years ago, the Scottish Government used a similar approach to help the Register for Scotland teams to improve their delivery efficiency (Register of Scotland - How we implemented Agile). By combining Agile and Lean to improve their Delivery, the RoS teams were able to reduce their Internal registration downtime from 110 hours to just 20, costs have fallen from £25,000 to £500 per release and 70% of calls are now resolved by the service desk (as opposed to 30% back in 2014).

How can this approach help the public sector and what is needed to make this a success?

From our experience, we have found the key elements to getting this right are:

• Starting with a Proof of Value (POV) – We tend to pick two volunteer squads to test with and prove this approach can work and add value.
• Senior Buy in and time – Agility transformation lives and dies by the clarity and direction of its leaders; teams need clear leadership, the support and empowerment to innovate and improve.
• Pod structure connects the transformation from exec to squads.
• Multi-disciplined Agility team with knowledge of Product, Design and DevSecOps as well as Agility.
• Desire to change culture – We don’t just mean continuous improvement, everybody does that, the difference is evolving to a resolute passion to rigorously improve everything.
• Data at the core – clear metrics give teams a direction of travel and an idea of where targeted improvements could add real value.
• Consider the people – We track job satisfaction because it’s important. Improvements come from your people. If you keep losing your people, you’re constantly going to be in a state of hiring and retraining, which is costly in terms of time and money. Happy people innovate and perform better.

Our Lean-Agility approach is very much an Agile approach to an Agile transformation, we start small prove the value, learn your business, customise and adapt. Lean-Agility is something we mould to you rather than a theory we try to plug and play, in that sense Lean-Agility for you will look and feel different to Lean-Agility for a different client and so it should!