SPA Conference session: Creating a Lean Business from the Inside Out | |||
| One-line description: | Technical innovation at uSwitch to reduce waste and become lean | ||
| Session format: | Case study (75 mins) [read about the different session types] | ||
| Abstract: | There is currently a lot of talk about Lean, Kanban and related practices but what does it really mean to be a Lean business and, more importantly, what are the practical benefits to your business? What do you need to put in place before you can operate on a Lean basis and how might that change the way you plan development of your products? If you're interested in answering these questions then this session is for you. We will demonstrate how technical innovation altered the way the business operates at uSwitch. You can see how we reduced time to market of an idea from 6 to 8 weeks to a matter of days. You will hear how we dramatically increased the frequency of releases and how this forced us to make them more efficient. Instead of releasing every 3 weeks and the process taking 2 or 3 days, we released two or three times a week with each taking a couple of hours. Planning just-in-time and releasing on demand enabled us to launch a brand new site in an international market, from scratch, in under three weeks. You will see the technology and processes we put in place to make this possible and how that changed our business. You can gain an understanding of how these techniques can alter the attitude to risk, making it easier to quickly identify what works and what doesn’t. You will also hear about techniques for measuring the value of what you’re developing. You will see how our business teams estimated value and also how we retrospectively measured value using multi-variate testing. | ||
| Audience background: | Anyone involved in development, management or planning within a software business. | ||
| Benefits of participating: | You will see practical examples of the changes made at uSwitch. You will understand the benefits of these changes. You will be introduced to examples of what technologies and practices uSwitch used to support a Lean business. The interactive part of the session will give you an indication of how the principles can be applied in other environments. | ||
| Materials provided: | A ppt presentation. | ||
| Process: | This will be a presentation followed by a goldfish bowl. | ||
| Detailed timetable: | 00:00 - 00:50 Presentation 00:50 - 01:15 Questions | ||
| Outputs: | The ppt presentation will be available and the output of the goldfish bowl will be summarised and published on the wiki. | ||
| History: | This presentation has been delivered internally at uSwitch. | ||
| Presenters | |||
| 1. Mark Durrand uSwitch Ltd |
2. Chris McGrath uSwitch Ltd |
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