Lean I.T. is Waaaay Overdue

Try as I might, I can't find a really good example of an organization devoted to Lean I.T. - that is; a company who continuously drives out waste from its I.T. processes.

Jeffrey K. Liker, author of The Toyota Way, has spent decades studying Toyota, who happen to be the most efficient manufacturing company on the planet. It's Toyota's passion to identify and remove "mudo" (waste) from all of their processes.

They describe waste as:

1. overproduction
2. waiting
3. unnecessary transport
4. overprocessing
5. excess inventory
6. unnecessary movement
7. defects
8. unused employee creativity

None of these activities add value, (as defined as something a customer would be willing to pay for) so when stripped away, the idea is to leave behind a process that ONLY adds value.

While America has embraced the notion of Lean Manufacturing (to varying degrees of success), I haven't found a great example of how lean principles are being used within I.T.

Consider the massive amounts of administration and management that go into every large I.T. project; the documentation, the approvals and sign offs, the numerous team meetings to "get everyone on the same page", the status reporting, document filing, retrieval etc.

Even the physical organization of the project should be scrutinized - are all the team players together in the same place or are they dispersed across several sites or across the organization?

Have you ever done post project forensics on your PM processes to determine which activities add REAL value? If you had to defend all the documentation you currently complete to your peers in other departments, could you do it? - even down to every box on every form?

I ask the question, because after Sarbanes-Oxley, it seems to me that the knee-jerk reaction is to document the heck out of every project, (regardless of risk) and whether or not the documentation adds any value.

And I think our I.T. processes have suffered as a result.

I have actually come across examples where for some small I.T. projects, managing the project is 80% of the work and the actual activities DOING the project (designing, coding, testing, implementing) amount to only 20%.

Houston we have a problem.

If you haven't looked at your I.T. processes in awhile, I'd recommend bringing in a "Lean Expert" to help you Value Stream Map your processes. VSM is a process whereby you actually, map, step by step, in intricate detail, how you believe a process works. The VSM process identifies "waste" wherever it appears within the process. At the end of the exercise, your team will be able to quantify how efficient your process is. Don't be surprized if you find that actual Value Added work is only a fraction (usually less than 5%) of the total elapsed process time.

Then, you observe the ACTUAL process to see how it works in "real life" and document it again.

Finally, your team identifies ways to cut out the waste. The results can be stunning.

I once worked for a company where VSM was done on an estimating process. The estimating process took about a week from the time we received a customer quote request to the time they had a formal quote back in their hands. After a VSM exercise, our improvement team found that over 70% of the quotes they received could be completed within 20 minutes. The actual value added work, in a process that took a week, was only 20 minutes! The rest was "waste".

Is lean I.T. long overdue at your company?