Five agility myths in energy and heavy industries

Enterprise agility cuts across the organization, digital and nondigital. We see impactful examples of agility in, for instance, procurement or continuous improvement, or analytics. Agile practices give autonomy to cross-functional teams (outside any digital initiatives) in any part of the organization; it can accelerate improvement programs of any sort that create business value.

Heavy industries are highly technical, so they benefit even more from a model that focuses on effective cross-discipline working and bringing in a minimum-viable product (MVP) mindset.

Agile ways of working and thinking can apply not only to changes in equipment design but also to measurement and analytics.

In a collaborative effort involving people inside and outside the organization, virtual “go and sees” were conducted with leading global mining companies and agile squads were institutionalized to drive change management. Advanced analytics were then used to deploy ten predictive models and two linear optimization models in an agile manner to achieve cost savings of approximately $3.5 million.

Any process run by people can be improved upon and can benefit from an agile approach of fast learning and high levels of ownership and accountability in teams. This applies across core run activities, such as production delivery or maintenance planning and execution. 

Introducing and maintaining agile working is worth not only the initial push but also the longer-term effort. At first, the language of agile can indeed be a block, but each organization already has its own terms of art (one might say jargon), and the language of agile working can match those terms.

Lean and agile ways of working complement each other, and the magic is in the combined recipe from both.

In reality, both systems have been successful across a range of environments, and both share a similar set of foundational objectives:

• Transparently connect strategy and goals to give teams meaningful purpose;
• Discover better ways of working to continually learn and improve;
• Deliver value efficiently for a customer;
• Enable people to contribute and lead to their fullest potential.

Lean organizations identify and eliminate activity that is not valued by the customer or end user. This systematic analysis of processes and value streams can reduce waste, variability, and inflexibility; it boosts performance in cost control, product quality, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement—often simultaneously.

Lean thinking represents a mindset of continuous improvement and flexible working in which all employees contribute new ideas; the organization becomes better over time. Freed from non-value-generating tasks, people can focus more on what matters to customers. 

When run together, lean processes bring the holistic view and basic principles, while agile processes bring the flexibility of short-cycle implementations (sprints) for continuous improvement. The lean approach tends to be more applicable to continuous improvements, providing directions or outside-in solutions to the value stream as part of the daily operational routine. The agile approach can bring the alignment and transparency of objectives to combine the expertise from the shop floor with short-cycle improvements.

Heavy industries have to manage multiple time horizons; that is, everything from problems solved over decades to problems solved in minutes. So while they have long capital planning, building, and maintenance cycles, they also have imminent demands. As agility combines dynamism with stability, a backbone of the right processes in governance, coordination, and transparency can exist alongside agile practices in planning, executing, and interacting with customers and suppliers.

Within each stage gate, agile thinking can accelerate and clarify a process; so within a design or planning cycle, an agile approach can shorten decision times and—by being inherently flexible—address and overcome delays.

Safety is critical. Agile’s emphasis on transparency, ownership and reduced handovers is especially important and relevant. Successful efforts here engage employees and build a strong safety culture, which has always been—and should continue to be—at the heart of asset-heavy companies. Combined with greater empowerment, that culture could forge real safety ownership in the front line, led by strong role modelling from top management down.

At the team level, where safety practice and culture is played out, an agile mindset means a continuous cycle of team learning and adaptation (learn fast) while managing risks effectively. 

 Any set of decisions can be made more transparent and more linear by an agile approach: decisions can be attached to a given point in time so that a series of small decisions becomes clear; these can be implemented in short learning cycles, reducing risks, correcting mistakes, and increasing the chance of success.