DC 2015 - Program

How we used Lean thinking to pivot a project away from uncertainty and towards success

Marc Esher, Software Delivery Team Lead at Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (@marcesher)

The Lean approach champions quick, cheap experiments designed to test hypotheses. It seeks to spend as few resources as possible determining what to build and then, once discovered, to pull back hard and build the thing right.

However, typically in our environment, we scope a project, assume it's the right thing to build, try to build it right, and do whatever's necessary to get it into production, which takes incredible effort.

During this session, I'll tell the story of how we applied Lean principles to pivot a project away from our traditional many-people/many-months approach and towards a resource-constrained discovery phase. Our output was both working software which the stakeholder team could use to validate their assumptions about project direction, and a much better understanding of several early technical uncertainties that represented risk to the original project.