Lean & Agile Development Consulting

Improve R&D performance with lean and agile development

The profitable and efficient development of new products and services is an essential key to corporate success. Every R&D department should therefore pursue these goals:

To maximize the saleable customer benefit of products.
Deliver added value quickly and in short cycles to react to changes.
Continuously improve the development methodology in order to generate a competitive advantage.

Product development is cost-intensive and characterized by uncertainties. Failure in this business function leads to a few problems: opportunity costs due to failed developments, delays, and cost overruns – and in the worst case, products that do not fit the market.

Bringing the right products to market at the right time requires high-performance development. In this case, high-performance means creating the right product with an optimal use of effort and resources. This is where lean and agile development comes into play.

ROI-EFESO: 12V Performance

Lean development consulting: increasing R&D efficiency

Lean development focuses on efficient value creation. This means that companies try to minimize non-value-adding activities in their development processes and thus make the best possible use of their capacities and capabilities. To achieve this, companies apply a number of principles to the development process and the development organization with our support and guidance.

Adapting development performance to business needs

A development organization must be able to deliver high quality results to the market within market cycles and customer expectations. This also means that development must be able to increase its pace and number of deliveries as the customer base grows and the Product portfolio diversifies.

One of the most effective ways to improve is to reduce waste in the development process, such as unnecessary meetings, long and complicated decision-making processes and unnecessary handovers. Unused skills and low quality of developed products also contribute to the waste of valuable development resources.

Identification of improvement options

Eliminating waste is a continuous process in a dynamic environment. A first step can be a Lean-Agile Development Assessment, in which we analyze the company’s development methods, processes and organization. In this short and focused project, we identify the most important areas for improvement and describe improvement initiatives.

Establishing a lean development organization

The design of the improvement projects differs from client to client. However, they are always based on the same principles:

Cadence and flow orientation.
Visual management and identification of problems.
Dealing with uncertainties in design and development.
Knowledge management and ensuring the exchange of knowledge.
Teams of responsible experts.
Use of lean leadership and establishment of an Entrepeneur System Designer.

By applying these principles, companies can shorten the lead time of their product development process (PDP) and at the same time deal effectively with market uncertainties and rapidly changing requirements.

Work with ROI-EFESO consultants to analyze, design and implement these initiatives in your specific environment.

Employees in a team discussion — ©Adobe Stock/stock.adobe.com

Agile organization and development effectiveness

Agile methods derive their ideas and principles from lean thinking and its successful further expansion in various development models, be it Scrum or Kanban, SAFe or LeSS. Over the last two decades, these methods have become extremely popular and successful on the market. However, the promise of “twice the work in half the time” or “more with less” often eludes development organizations using agile frameworks.

A whole range of companies are struggling …

maximize customer value,
deliver value in small, functional increments,
continuously improve development methods and processes.

To fulfill the hopes of shorter time-to-market, higher customer satisfaction and rapid adaptability, these tasks in particular need to be solved: finding an approach that fits the organization, applying the right management style and anchoring agile values and mindsets through successful change management.

Customized development agility

We know that the challenges faced by organizations are as diverse as their products and services. Your organization is not a copy of any other. Therefore, all our implementations of agile organizations start from “first principles”. You and we know that simply imposing a framework on an organization leads to more problems than solutions.

That’s why we work with you to create the lean, agile development organization that fits your products and people. Based on our experience in the areas of transformation, training and change management, we bring this system to life together.

Agility beyond software, lean beyond production

In our experience, agility clearly also makes sense for development areas outside of software.

We have successfully introduced and implemented agile methods outside of pure software development. This is particularly important as the amount of software in products increases, and the integration of hardware and software development becomes more complex. The expertise you can benefit from is also reflected in our customized development of agile development processes for AI-supported products.

With its proven lean and agile expertise, the ROI-EFESO management consultancy team supports you in transferring findings from production to the world of development.

We have demonstrated our transfer capabilities in a number of highly successful hybrid development models and PEP implementations as well as in the context of our software development performance evaluation. In this, we combine classic lean and agile methods with state-of-the-art data mining. As a result, we are able to increase the efficiency of your software development – sustainably and measurably.

CONTACT

Dr. Jan-Christoph Haag
Infanteriestraße 11
D-80797 München
Tel.: +49 89 1215 90-0

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SERVICES

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Case Study

Lean development in R&D

Innovation impulses for lighting designers. The LED revolution has made many business models obsolete, while the wave of digitization and the associated technological change have increased the pace of change by a factor of X. To keep pace here, agile working methods are necessary not only in manufacturing, but also in R&D. Lean methods can prove particularly helpful - but can they be transferred 1:1 from manufacturing to development?

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Case Study

Lean Digital Manager

Shaping the factory of the future with Lean 4.0. How can lean principles be combined with the technologies and possibilities of networked digitization in value creation networks? By further qualifying employees to become decision-makers. The ROI-EFESO certification program for "Lean Digital Manager" shows how digitalization of lean production works. To do this, it combines strategies with Industry 4.0 technologies.