Lessons Learned from a Lean R&D Project

In a partnership between academia and industry, we report our experience in applying the Lean R&D approach in the IAGO project, an oil and gas machine-learning-based dashboard. The approach is grounded in continuous experimentation through agile development, beginning with a Lean Inception workshop to define a Minimal Viable Product. Then, after technical feasibility assessments and conception phases, Scrum-based development begins, continually testing business hypotheses. We discuss our experiences in following the approach, and report developers’ perceptions gathered through interviews and user evaluations of the final product. We found that the Lean Inception works well for aligning expectations and objectives among stakeholders, but it is not enough to level the domain knowledge among developers. The participation of end users in the workshop and throughout the project, as well as constant communication among all stakeholders, is very important to deliver appropriate solutions.