There is a deep cultural belief in Australian business that 'there just has to be a better way'.
In 2009 the small team of legal affairs professionals at Lonely Planet headquarters in Melbourne had witnessed first-hand the transition of an IT and digital product organisation to agile and kanban methods, and they suspected many of the principles could work for them too.
Focusing on customer value, flow of work, and waste elimination as their key tenets, they transformed their team from an order-taking shared service model (with an invisible workload) to running a sustainable pull system with a sophisticated wip-limited kanban board, where work is not 'done' until the first value flows from a contract.
This case study shows how a profession built on adherence to long-standing command and control culture can through application of lean, agile and kanban principles become an influential innovator among their knowledge worker peers in a global organisation.
