Leveraging Lean for IT and research tran...

In 2012, the IT division of a U.S. national research and development laboratory with over 4,500 staff began their Lean IT journey. After working with Mike Orzen, a pioneer in Lean IT, the organization is learning to embrace small incremental change, trial and discovery, and value the answer to the question “what did we learn?” There is an metaphor that says, “the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time,” but our tendency is to bite off more than we can chew often leading to failed deployments, partially or improperly built solutions or...

Service Desk – VOC: the heart of Lean in...

OobeyaIT – APTiTUDE at the Service Desk How did a Service Desk help lead the change of culture and improvement within a financial services organisation? The problem: IT management had changed from a service to project culture so CREATE side did not talk to the run side until to late. So the Service Desk was repeatedly solving things, performing unneeded tasks, had poor KPIs and tools, and higher costs. One year later and we were the Face-of-IT with measurable days saved in tasks, 80% satisfaction improvement, accelerated request fulfilment, happier staff and gave more...

Lean and ITIL: reaching to the (hidden f...

ITILv2 certifies people, not organizations. Yet it’s a library of good practices that organizations are supposed to follow (or even be certified on under ISO 20,000). So, with predefined processes as a North Star to reach for, it’s very attractive to wanting to use Lean to improve them. Yet, when you first grasp the situation, you soon discover that the shiny, fixed, paper Moon map is nowhere to be found in reality. The further you look, the more you understand that there’s something else to that, and that you need to go on the other side of it to discover what’s...

Lean Data Center: A Telco Experience

Service Providers are complex organizations with several departments like IT, Service Support and Innovation. Andrea shared lessons from several Lean cases within Telecom Italia, the Italian leading Telco Service Provider. The experiences regard the Lean Data Center initiative and improvement of the Product Service Delivery and Service Assurance Processes. Andrea presented the approach he used and how he notably tailored Lean tools to a data center environment, the impact on people and the results he obtained. Specific issues of service environments were highlighted such...

An IT manager goes to the gemba to engag...

How do you know if your teams and managers are aligned with your objectives? How do you get your teams to progress and better serve their users? An IT production manager at BNP Paribas will explain his challenge with involving his first-line managers in this process, and what he learned along the way.