Lawell Kiing gave a talk on lean and innovation. He discussed how lean principles like cross-functional teams, small batches, and eliminating waste can enable faster innovation at lower costs. However, lean alone does not guarantee innovation - other factors like priorities, leadership, culture and adapting to change are also needed. While lean removes barriers, companies must avoid using it just as a replacement process and instead foster an environment where diverse ideas can be tested and learning amplified. The overall goal of lean as it relates to innovation is to deliver value to customers as quickly as possible.

1. UBC Alumni Lecture
Lean and Innovation
Lawell Kiing
Senior Director, Engineering

2. LEAN/Agile Development

3. LEAN/Agile Development

4. Innovation
Product and/or service that delivers a significant increase in the
“pleasure” of an existing process/product/service. Pleasure can be
measured as in efficiency, costs (economics) and/or user experience

5. LEAN and Innovation – Match?

6. Innovation Inhibitors
Managing chaos
Uncertainty
Silos and homogeneity
Speed and cost of innovation
Customer wants
Idea to implementation to results

7. Managing Chaos
Let Chaos Reign Structured Process
● Hard to start ● Rigid
● Lack of focus ● Another project
● Hard to sell ● Too much expectation
● Easy to give up ● Too focused
● No structure ● Hard to attract

8. Silos and homogeneity
Silos Homogeneity
•Development teams vs. •Same profession yields
test teams vs. doc same ideas
teams, etc… •Not open to outside point
•Hand offs, like an of views
assembly line •Does not understand the
•Only understand one part whole
of the assembly •Same work leads to same
•Idling, wastes, handoffs, d concepts
ependencies and
bottlenecks

9. LEAN Cross Functional Team
Cross Functionality
Overall Team Skills
● Reduces handover
● Employs a diversity of ideas
● Fosters common end-to-end understanding
● Increases flexibility of individuals and teams
● Removes dependencies & bottlenecks
● Reduces work in progress
● Avoids idling specialists
Favoring Generalizing Specialists
● One or more fields of expertise Me today Me in 2 years Me in 5 years
● General knowledge of software development
● General knowledge of business domain
● Actively seeking to gain new skills
© SAP 2010 / Page 9

10. Speed of Innovation

11. Cost of Innovation

12. LEAN Speed and Cost
•LEAN principles: deliver value as fast as possible, eliminate
waste
•Small batches in size and fixed length of time
•Practically, sprints are no more than 4 weeks, can even go 1
week
•Costs are incremental and iterative, unnecessary wastes such
as bottlenecks and handoffs are minimized

14. LEAN Dealing with Unknown
ADAPTABILITY
MEASUREMENTS
AMPLIFIED LEARNING

15. Customers
•Concept of value is core to LEAN
•Value is from the point of view of the customer/user
•Value stream mapping is the concept of mapping where value
is delivered to the customer and eliminate those areas that
don’t
•Key is the concept of the prioritized backlog and demo to the
customer
•Getting customers and users feedback are often the forgotten
step
•LEAN forces the understanding of the customer and users to
be a core value and requirement

16. Idea to Implementation to Results

17. My Experience - Innovation Week
 Create outstanding innovation for <project>
– Innovation needs to be very visible for the end-user and easy
to use
– Innovation needs to be easy to understand and explain
– Need to knock the socks off the customer and end-users
 Innovation Pilot
– Pilot for other innovation weeks
– Pilot for other innovation initiatives in engineering
 Create excitement
– Inspiring and challenging
– Forming new disparate teams, unlocking potential through
diversity
– Empowering for everyone
© SAP 2007 / Page 17

18. Format of Innovation Week
Friday September 12th: Innovation training day provided by
Roger Garriock of DICor (8:30am to 4:30pm)
Monday September 15th: Kickoff day, speakers to provide
background, context and even customer pain points to help
focus the exercise.
Speakers from PDM, pre-sales, customer support and PgMs.
Tues/Wed September 16th and 17th: cross-functional teams
(i.e. form from people from all walks including dev, QA, arch,
Ux, etc…) form and brainstorm and come up with an
innovation idea/pitch for Pioneer
Thursday afternoon: each team to pitch their idea to a
“board” (myself and a few others TBD)
Friday: Innovation sprint candidates announced
© SAP 2007 / Page 18

19. Rules
Teams will be assigned and should be diverse, which means:
Cross-roles
Cross-teams
Cross-profiles
Visible product innovation ONLY
Not process improvements
Not internal plumbing innovation
Must be applicable to <project>
© SAP 2007 / Page 19

20. “It's not the strongest that
survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the one
most responsive to
change.”
Charles Darwin

21. Final Thoughts
•Important to remember that LEAN ≠ Innovation
•There are many other factors to innovation
•Things such as priorities, leadership, investments, culture,
environment, etc…
•What I want to show is that LEAN is not an inhibitor to
innovation, but that its principles are in fact enablers
•But you still need the other factors to succeed…
•Many companies implement LEAN/Agile as a process
replacement, this will not foster innovation just as the old
process did not foster innovation
•There are not many rules to LEAN. But if you break the core
rules/principles, the whole thing falls apart.
•Now, go do it and see for yourself (go gemba)

22. A day without
laughter is a day
wasted.
Charlie Chaplin

23. Thank You
Lawell Kiing
Senior Director Engineering
SAP Canada
Lawell.kiing@sap.com