Agile and Lean Office: Key to Increasing Profit and Employee/Customer Satisfaction

Agile and Lean Office are so deeply interwoven that if you are doing agile you are doing lean, and vice-versa. Those considering process change will likely find the description of the interrelatedness interesting and enlightening. The question should I use lean office instead of agile office is based on a false premise because office environments are complex systems. There can be thousands of integration points as information flows along a value stream. As a result it is almost impossible to understand in detail how a change to one part of a value stream will impact the rest of the system-wide value streams of the organization. The Agile and Lean Office approach uses a program of continuous performance improvement. This approach does not try to accomplish too much at once and risk complete failure, but to make an incremental change to a value stream, wait for the system to settle down, fully understand the system-wide impact of the changes, and then decide what new change to make.