Principles of Rightshifting:
Lean Systems Thinking

The effective business

"To lead people, walk beside them. When the best leaders' work is done, the people say, 'We did it ourselves!'"

Lao Tse

All organisations engaged in developing and delivering products and services need leadership and organisation, an ability to solve problems and a design and development capacity ("engineering").

However, if we consider the traditional company structure, these four essential strands might be represented as separate linked sections of the organisation (fig. 1)

The interactions between the different activities, and the loss of communication that occurs, are the root cause of much of the waste and loss of effectiveness that we find in the system. The more hand-offs of knowledge and information there are, the greater the risk of failure. It becomes a game of chinese whispers with each individual interpreting and re-interpreting the value the organisation is seeking to deliver.

In an organisation run on Lean management principles, the four essential organisational strands might be represented more like strands of DNA; interdependent, able to replicate, and all supporting the delivery of value. (fig 2)

Empowering the workforce to deliver value

The most important part of an organisation is its people. Particularly in the software development world, there is a perception that "good people", using modern methodology, will automatically deliver value to the business.

Well, you might get lucky. But if the business has no defined mechanism for identifying and communicating what value means to its stakeholders, it is extremely likely that you are wasting much of the skill, knowledge and goodwill your people bring to the table.

Machine intelligence excels at processing lots of information very quickly. People excel at extrapolating information, turning it into knowledge and creating something new.

Rightshifting is about harnessing the power of machine intelligence to the creativity of your people to achieve the goals of your business.

Lean Management Principles

Organisations increasingly need to exploit the knowledge and creativity of their human resources. The business engages software professionals to develop software. It clearly is counter-productive to have non-expert managers telling them how to do it.

A creative workforce requires creative, solution-focused management. It requires evidence-based decision-making which not only avoids unconscious damage to the business but also reassures dedicated staff that good practice will not be arbitrarily overturned by ill-informed management decisions.

Lean systems thinking

The principles of Lean systems thinking are:

Value: understanding value from the customer's, user's and stakeholders perspectives
Process: an in-depth understanding of the end-to-end network of processes required to design, develop, produce and maintain the product, whether such processes add value or not
Pull: enabling customer/stakeholder demand to pull value through the steps of the value stream
Flow: enable value to flow continuously, piece-by-piece. Value is always delivered "just-in-time" without excessive stock-piling.
Perfection: continuous striving to reduce waste, build-in quality to avoid failure demand; respond to demand for value as it changes; and improve flow

These principles inform the four key ingredients - the "strands" of the Rightshifted company's DNA, which can be found throughout the organisation, at all levels:-

Leadership focused on delivering value
Organisation structure that supports the delivery of value
Problem-solving based on evidence, process and organisational learning
Engineering and design applying expert knowledge to the end-to-end product lifecycle.