Successfully Transforming to Lean by Changing the Mindset in a Global Product Development Team

This paper describes the experience of a global software engineering organization in transforming to Lean. Deploying Lean processes did result in several improvements, but the primary goal -- usable software at the end of each takt (iterations or increments, or single-piece flow) -- was not achieved. We recognized that to achieve the primary goal and larger benefits of Lean, we needed to change the mindset of the global development team, and we defined approaches to enable this change. We have described the steps taken to make this change. The results achieved are also presented.