To Lean or not to Lean
- Subbarao Chaganty, Senior Consultant, Infosys
Paying my sincere respects to William Shakespeare for his most famous phrase “To be or not to be” from Hamlet, I took the liberty of reconstructing this phrase to lead us to an important topic.
I’ve come across quality and process improvement methodologies like Six Sigma, CMMI and so on, where you would have to dig deeper to better understand the philosophy and the methodology of the framework. However when we come to Lean it’s as self explanatory as it can get for a powerful methodology that it represents. Kudos also to Toyota for developing and promoting this philosophy in their manufacturing plants to become one of the most popular auto-makers in the world and on top of that keeping it as simple as possible.
Although it comes with certain principles and guidance on where and how can you apply Lean to achieve optimization, you can pretty much apply it to any aspect of the personal or professional lives – How can one be leaner and hence more energetic ? How can one reduce the commute time to work ? Moving on to some business challenges like how can the time to market the product be reduced ? How can the loan approval cycle time be improved (definitely not sub-prime
) ? Which brings us to the current economic conditions where mantras like “More for less”, “Reduce cost”, “Increase productivity”, “Avoid non-critical spending” sound like music to the ears.
Organizations that want to be agile, efficient and productive can turn towards “Lean” to achieve one or more of these goals. At the outset a deeper understanding of the following is absolutely necessary:
1. Is there definite business sense and clearly defined value derived from the services and products offered ?
2. Is there a clear understanding of the value stream – how is the consolidated value created from different parts, people and processes of the organization ?
3. Is there is a clear flow of control and movement across the value stream – who consumes what and produces what in the entire value chain ?
4. Is there enough focus on utilizing the resources efficiently and in a timely manner ? (Did you come across “Just in time” principles for effective resource management)
5. Is there sufficient focus on working efficiently by eliminating any wasteful activities and operating at near perfection levels?
By critically reviewing the above aspects in all areas of the operations and building short term quick wins, medium term and long term programs – organizations will be better prepared to weather this storm. This will also strengthen fundamental operations to embark on more “Value Generating” initiatives in the future.
It makes absolute sense “To Lean” than “Not to Lean” in these challenging times. One of my earlier blogs traced our journey of practically applying Lean to an application monitoring support environment with the objective of removing waste and optimizing the operations support.
Comments
While it would be a great idea to apply lean to IT management, the biggest problem I see is the complexity that is already existing (especially) in enterprises. And those vendors who are making money by the support and other services (sorry - including Infosys) depends a lot on this complexity for their revenues. Simplicity is not a design criteria for most of them. Creating solutions that requires minimal management or servicing is not a design goal for many of these IT providers. So IMO, applying lean in IT management needs a radically different approach. The current approach is just suited (or created by) for the vendors who sell complex solutions thereby creating services revenues for others! But your thoughts are perfectly valid otherwise - but I would be skeptical of people being able to use lean methodologies in IT pretty quickly.
Posted by: Jayadeep Purushothaman | February 6, 2009 12:21 AM
Thanks Jayadeep for reviewing my blog and bringing out a very pertinent point:
I have come across several organizations that have significant focus on “Simplification” in IT which I think ties very well to the point you are making about the need for all stakeholders including vendors to approach their solutions and services from this perspective. Avenues like consolidation, demand reduction are among the levers that can help achieve the Simplification goals. In one way. it’s also an evolutionary and maturity process for the solutions and services, so ability to recognize concepts like Lean which have worked well in the manufacturing domain and fast track their adoption in other domains including IT can only help us get there faster.
Posted by: Subbarao Chaganty | March 20, 2009 06:25 AM