Bent Jensen presented Lean to Valtech consultants

Yesterday evening we had a presentation of Lean Software Development by Bent Jensen at our Valtech premises in Paris. Bent is helping Elisabeth, a colleague from Valtech, in a mission where our client wants to apply Lean techniques to reduce the cost of their product. Bent has spent a couple of days in Paris and we took this occasion to organize this presentation in the context of our weekly evening training agenda.

Bent made a clear and concise presentation of what Lean is and where does it come from, as well as he explained what Lean actually means in the software development field. After the presentation, Elisabeth talked about their ongoing mission and what they achieved so far, illustrating her explanations with pictures from battlefield.

I really appreciated to hear and discuss application of Lean in software development field. After reading the reference book The Machine That Changed The World, that gave me much more concrete examples and analogies in our field. The point of the presentation that I especially recall is when Bent talked about so-called exploration phase (first iterations) and construction phase (after some iterations) in the lean development process he sketched on one of his slide. He pointed out that this is the way Toyota does in their product development process. Lots of talks are going on in the Agile world whether running an "iteration 0" to settle down some architectural components or frameworks. I think he had an interesting point for this debate. To some extent, what Bent presented recalls a bit the RUP (Rational Unified Process) with its elaboration and construction phases (but no idea here of inception and transition).

Bent's company has a blog where he posts news. I found there some of the stories he told during his talk, like the Lego bug tracking system or his trip to Japan.