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Glossary
The words we work with
Plain-English definitions for every Lean and Agile term you will meet in our playbook. No jargon left unexplained.
- Agile
- A way of working that delivers value in short cycles, learns from each one, and adapts the plan as reality changes.
- ART (Agile Release Train)
- A long-lived team of agile teams that plans, commits and delivers together on a fixed cadence.
- DevOps & CI/CD
- The practice (and pipeline) of building, testing and releasing software continuously, so change flows to production safely and often.
- DPM (Daily Performance Management)
- A short, structured daily routine where a team reviews its performance against targets and acts on deviations immediately.
- Flow & Pull
- Designing work so it moves continuously (flow) and is started only when there is real demand for it (pull), rather than pushed in batches.
- HOSHIN Kanri
- A strategy-deployment method that cascades a small number of breakthrough goals from leadership to every team, and reconciles progress against them. It anchors Phase 1 of the journey.
- Kaikaku
- Radical, step-change improvement, as opposed to kaizen's continuous small steps. Often sparked by benchmarking against the best.
- Kaizen
- Continuous improvement in small steps, owned by the people who do the work. Each kaizen is a concrete, measurable change. See it at scale in the Mercedes-Benz story.
- Kanban
- A visual method for managing work: make it visible, limit work in progress, and let capacity pull the next item.
- Lean
- A management philosophy focused on creating customer value with the least possible waste, built on respect for people and continuous improvement.
- Obeya
- A dedicated room (physical or digital) where a team's goals, plans and performance are visible in one place and worked daily.
- SCRUM
- An agile framework in which a cross-functional team delivers a working increment every short, fixed-length sprint.
- Value stream
- The end-to-end sequence of activities that turns a customer request into delivered value, the unit at which we map, measure and improve.
- VSM (Value Stream Mapping)
- Mapping every step, delay and handoff in a value stream to expose waste and design a better future state.
Every term above appears somewhere in our playbook, see how we work and the journey for them in context.