Two months ago we told you about an article in CIO magazine that basically claimed "lean won’t work here." How many times have we heard that? As the author, Dean Meyer (no relation), claimed,
Apply Lean and Six Sigma to a job that involves diverse tasks, relationships and creative problem solving (like what most IT staff do) and you may find you’ve created a very efficient organization that fails to accomplish its purpose. Lean and Six Sigma can make certain operational functions within an IT organization more efficient. But these two methods are certainly not appropriate centerpieces of an organizational transformation program.
Yeah, right. As we put it back then,
I guess a knuckle-dragging manufacturing grunt like myself with no need for creativity should just accept those statements. But that would be doing a disservice to all the creative types that have taken their organizations to the next level using lean and six sigma methods.
But maybe CIO has seen the light, or at least the need for balance. Today they ran an article titled Learning to Love Lean IT, which specifically talks about the benefits lean manufacturing methods can create for IT operations. The article chronicles the lean efforts of Pat Quinn, newly appointed VP of IT at Acuity Brands Lighting, run by a CEO that insists on lean in all operations.
Quinn was charged with providing systems to enable the manufacturing changes. But as he learned more about lean tools and techniques for cutting waste and enabling continuous improvement, he saw that IT could benefit from them as well. “Eliminating waste doesn’t just apply to scrap metal. It can mean eliminating the waste of intellectual property or human resources or anything else," he says.
Of course it’s never quite that easy, especially when many IT types probably subscribe to CIO and read articles by Dean Meyer (no relation).
The IT team was skeptical. "They could see how lean was valuable for everybody else, for manufacturing or finance or anyone they viewed as transactional," says Quinn. "But IT saw itself as creative and worried that lean would suppress that creativity." Quinn understood. "We’re not creating widgets," he told his employees. "But when you create, for example, a software product, there’s still tremendous waste. And creating a process framework doesn’t have to depress creativity."
Yep, I wonder who put that "lean is incompatible with creativity" bug in their heads… As usual the results speak for themselves.
Results have ranged from finally weaning the company off IBM mainframes in use for 20 years to transitioning corporate headquarters (and 175 call center agents and 25 apps) to VoIP in less than two months. The transition has required bigchanges in thinking. One lean event revealed that application development could be greatly improved with pair programming—multiple programmers working together on code. "I thought, there’s no way that’s going to work," says Quinn, a former programmer himself. "But I was completely wrong."
Hats off to CIO magazine for seeing the error of their earlier ways. Lean methods can be applied to any part of any organization, and as we just learned, even to IT.
david foster says
“IT saw itself as creative and worried that lean would suppress that creativity”…I feel confident that in most companies you could find a lot of people who view IT as one of the least creative functions in the company, and an inhibitor of creativity in other functions.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t many IT people who are individually creative, but too often the overall impact of an IT organization, in terms of the overall business, is a reactionary rather than a progressive one. Part of the problem is the arrogance revealed by the above quote.
Jay says
Contrary to what the CIO magazine says, lean principles have been applied to IT for over 10 years now. Refer Lean Software Development by the Poppendiecks, or XP: Embrace Change by Kent Beck or Ken Schwaber’s SCRUM methodology. I’ve been involved in IT projects that use lean for over 3 years now. Its gaining a lot of prominence and the fact that the CIO magazine sees it ten years hence is probably an indication of how slow good ideas move up the heirarchy more than anything else.
Karen Wilhelm says
IT can use the same lean techniques as product development and other project-based work. Hal Macomber of “Reforming Project Management” taught me that one difference is to look for muri (or is it mura?)instead of muda. Whatever it’s called, it is the burdening or straining of resources. Look at Hal’s work for well-thought out ways to run lean projects. Ron Mascitelli also has some good material out there.
IT can also be like a job shop. The job shop owner always says, “I can’t do lean because every job is different.” No, they’re not. All work has patterns, and when you identify the similarities in features or processes you can start stabilizing and creating flexibility in how it’s done.
IT’s worst sin is its disdain for its customer – how bad does it sound to call us “users”? Rather than sit next to someone doing the work and observing all the nuances and exceptions that occur, IT makes you stop work and fill out “functional requirements” where you’re going to forget about a bunch of stuff and miss opportunities to make improvements because you’re too close to see them. Then IT spends millions of dollars following the requirements to the letter so they can blame the customer for a bad product, delivered late and over budget.
Do I sound harsh? It must be my 30 years as a user, not a customer or a partner.