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Agile Manufacturing

Course outline

3 days
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Duration

3 days

Synopsis

Agile manufacturing is a new and revolutionary way of manufacturing and assembling products. It is the next logical step in the evolutionary chain of manufacturing technologies, following on the heels of its predecessors, craft production, mass production, and lean production. This course explains what agile manufacturing is, and what needs to be done to successfully pave the way for its implementation. Successful implementation requires changes in five areas: government regulation, business cooperation, information technology, reengineering, and employee flexibility.

The potential benefits of successfully implementing agile manufacturing are much too great for an organization to overlook, as are the potential consequences of failing to implement it. Though many organizations have made strides toward implementing agile manufacturing, there is much work that needs to be done. Corporations need the backing of strong infrastructure to make agile manufacturing successful.

The focus of agile manufacturing lays on the response time and the aim is to react to customer needs quickly. Therefore, agility and speed become the competitive advantages of agile manufacturing.

The processes, tools and training are often supported by a highly integrated information technology system. The products tend to be highly customizable and modular. The technology is used to allow different players (marketers, designers, the production team) to share data and to use it to solve problems that might slow down the process otherwise. The emphasis is on correcting quality issues and implementing changes at the earliest point in the manufacturing process, as this is considered cheaper and quicker than corrective actions later on.

This requires agile manufacturing organizations to be structured differently compared to traditional manufacturers. These organizations tend to have flatter hierarchical structures, as employees need to react quickly to customers’ needs. This also requires the organizations to have high levels of communication to ensure changes are implemented

swiftly.

Learning Objectives

  • Set up an Agile project
  • Assign roles and responsibilities
  • Create prioritized list of requirements
  • Define increments and timeboxes
  • Manage a Solution Development Team or Teams
  • Use Agile techniques such as Feature Driven Development
  • Present the benefits of Agile approaches to Senior Management
  • Learn the underlying principles that guide Agile environments
  • Learn how to overcome the resistance that inevitably comes with change
  • Identify which roles will change and which roles no longer are needed in an Agile environment
  • Discover how to employ Agile tools and processes in solving problems within complex environments
  • Discover what productivity gains are possible and how to measure improvement in an Agile environment
  • Benefits to the business – increasing the efficiency of development and operational handoffs
  • Concepts and practices (including its relationship to Agile, Lean and IT Service Management (ITSM)
  • Improved workflows
  • Improved communication and feedback loops
  • Reliance on automation
  • Applying DevOps in a manufacturing environment
  • Critical success factors and key performance indicators
  • Real-life examples and results

Target Audience

  • CXOs (CIOs and CTOs in particular)
  • Developers
  • Project Managers
  • QA
  • Product Managers

Day 1

Introduction to Agile Manufacturing and Getting Started

  • Origins of the Agile Movement
  • The Agile Manifesto
  • Why Transitioning is so hard but worth it
  • ADAPTing to Agile (Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promotion, Transfer)
  • Patterns for adopting Agile
  • Iterating towards Agility
  • Selecting Pilot Projects
  • Case Study: The Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing
  • Hands-on Exercises (Analyzing your current environment)

Individuals and Interactions

  • Overcoming Resistance
  • Communicating about Change
  • New Roles (Product Owner, ScrumMaster)
  • Changed Roles (Project Manager, Developers, Analysts, Testers, etc)
  • Improving Technical Practices
  • Introducing Metrics and Statistical/Empirical Process Control
  • Case Study: Kanban
  • Hands-on Exercises (Metrics)

Teams and Team Interactions

  • Team Structure and Guidelines
  • Self-Organizing Teams
  • Embracing Whole-Team Responsibility
  • Generalists vs. Specialists – The Cross-Functional Team
  • Fostering Team Learning – Knowledge Radiation
  • Encouraging collaboration through commitment

Organizational Interactions

  • Scaling Agile Deployments
  • Working with a large product backlog
  • Proactively managing dependencies – lookahead planning
  • Coordinating work among teams
  • Scaling the Sprint/Iteration planning meeting
  • Cultivating Communities of Practice
  • Distributed Teams
  • Coexisting with other approaches – Governance and compliance
  • Human Resources, Facilities, and the PMO
  • Case Study: Scaling Agile Manufacturing
  • Hands-on Exercises

Day 2

What is Agile Project Management?

  • Understanding the business need for Agile project management
  • Traditional vs. Agile project management techniques
  • Basic techniques and overview of Agile project management
  • Roles and Responsibilities (30 min)
  • Traditional Project Management roles transformed
  • New set of responsibilities

Agile Project Management Process and Products

  • Scheduling
  • Prioritizing
  • Managing Risk
  • Reporting to Senior Management
  • Leading self-organizing teams
  • Servant leadership
  • Measuring progress

Hands-On Excercise

  • Participants will be asked to identify any project they wish to transform to an Agile approach
  • Participants will be asked to construct a simple prioritized backlog of work items
  • Participants will be asked to note risk, business value, and technical difficulty of each work item

Prioritization and Timeboxing

  • Effective techniques for balancing business and technical priorities
  • Timeboxing meetings
  • Product backlog approaches

Agile Control

  • Managing/Controlling Agile projects

Agile Requirements and Estimation

  • User stories, personas, user journeys
  • Estimation techniques

Agile Planning

  • Release planning
  • Sprint planning

Hands-on Exercise

  • Participants will be asked to identify user stories, personas, and user journeys for some of the work items from the previous exercise
  • Participants will be asked to estimate the stories they have created

Day 3

Fundamental Terminology and Concepts

  • Understanding the business need for DevOps
  • DevOps capabilities
  • Deployment, Testing, Monitoring, and Feedback loops
  • Measuring value and what DevOps is not

Brief History of DevOps

  • Roots in Lean thinking and manufacturing
  • Agile development practices
  • Automation/Virtualization

Business Drivers for DevOps

  • Improving SLAs
  • Fast TTM
  • Reducing operational inefficiencies through automation
  • Increasing capacity to innovate

DevOps Capabilities

  • Paths to DevOps adoption
  • Steer/Develop-Test/Deploy/Operate
  • Identifying bottlenecks in delivery pipeline
  • Continuous feedback and optimization

DevOps Processes

  • Value-Stream Mapping
  • Infrastructure as code
  • Deployment automation

Hands-On Excercise

  • Participants will be asked to identify their delivery pipelines
  • Participants will be asked to construct value-stream maps for their chosen delivery pipleines
  • Participants will be asked to identify potential bottlenecks based on their value-stream maps and how to alleviate them

DevOps Culture – Individuals and Interactions (60 min)

  • Measuring culture
  • DevOps teams creation
  • Open communication
  • Incentive and Responsibility alignment
  • Executive Sponsorship
  • Technical Leadership
  • Set Goals
  • Mentoring
  • Anti-patterns

DevOps Communication Tools

  • Using automation tools syntax as a common language framework
  • Version control for environment building and deployment to the data center

DevOps in the Enterprise – Examples and Case Study

  • Mobile Applications
  • Supply Chains
  • IoT
  • IBM Case Study

Hands-on Exercise

  • Using Vagrant/Ansible/Docker to deploy test and production environments
  • Ansible syntax

Programme scope, delivery arrangements and suitability are confirmed during enquiry.