Lean-Agile Procurement

A From a Agilist, People Management, HR
Point of View

Why Lean-Agile Procurement

Volatile, uncertain and often unpredictable Market conditions demanded unprecedented levels of adaptability within and between organizations. Lean-Agile Procurement (LAP) provides it and is the first Approach, that combines Agile Values & Principles to take strategic Sourcing to a new Level.

LAP seeks to overcome the following key challenges in strategic sourcing:

  • Misalignment / misunderstanding (internally and externally) due to focus on paperwork and documentation

  • Transactional nature of Rfx including hand-offs between departments where often different people are responsible for sourcing than those for delivery

  • Complexity/unknowns where requirements are more hypothetical, and often change. Subject matter experts need to be involved as procurement can't make the assumption to know of the details up front and understand it all anymore, e.g. on issues like ESG, AI

  • Long lead times, which in turn lead to expensive and time consuming change requests in delivery, because the world has changed in the interim.

Value Proposition
of LAP

For complex business cases that require external support, services, or products LAP offers a collaborative approach to select & deliver better outcomes faster together

DevOps on Steroids!

The visualization to the right may help you understand how LAP delivers value to the market/customer. At its core is the cross-functional Agile delivery team, that's also responsible for sourcing. Depending on the strategic sourcing case, the skills on the team may vary, but the business owner is always leading the team and procurement is a team member that facilitates through the 7-8 sourcing steps. In our experience, the mere fact of having all the skills in place improves time-to-market by 100%! - Using LAP with Scrum as the operating model for the team has shown to improve time-to-market by up to 800%!

Social & Cultural Fit

The Execution initiated through a collaborative event called the Big Room Workshop forms the heart of Lean-Agile Procurement. The Big Room Workshop brings the cross-functional team, stakeholder, end-user/-customer from the buyer together with the vendor/partners to co-create their proposals, negotiate a contract, etc. As important as the Business-Fit is the Social & Cultural Fit of the people that will for a Cross-Company Team while Delivery!

Criteria for success in need of your support

  • The business owner takes the driver's seat or delegates a Product Owner who owns decisions at all levels, incl. budgets

  • The Product Owner leads an "Agile Delivery Team" from Ideation to Value Creation stages

  • Procurement acts as a facilitator of this entire process

  • The team must connect daily spending considerable time together aligning on the common goal

  • The scrum team has all capabilities needed so that it can operate as independent as possible

  • The sourcing via Lean-Agile Procurement doesn't start until the full team is available

  • The Sponsor/ key decision maker makes themselves available at least for a joint kickoff and the sprint reviews

  • Cross-chapter/function resources are made available if special skillsets are required e.g. for Workshops

Typical Results reported by Organizations using LAP

100-800%

Improved Time-to-Market

50%

80%

of usual Effort

Risk Reduction

9/10

Recommendation Rate

Benefits with LAP

  • Up to 10X improved lead time since solution will be co-created without working in silos

  • On an avg. 50% less efforts compared to traditional sourcing

  • Addresses uncertainty and minimizes risks via short Feedback-/Delivery cycles

  • Up to 80% improved ROI (return on investment) via "outcome-based approach"

  • 9 out of 10 Satisfaction Rate via optimal Stakeholder / Vendor involvement

  • Keeping driver-seat from idea till value delivered (no hand-overs)

  • Flexible approach that even allows to fall back to a traditional approach if needed