5 Important Things To Know About Lean Kaizen White Paper

Transcription

1 5 Important Things To Know About Lean Kaizen White Paper Troy DuMoulin VP, Research & Development Pink Elephant

2 Introduction Time has proven again and again that organizations that rest on their laurels, content with the status quo, will inevitably find themselves on a slow-but-sure path to obscurity. In fact, the principle of entropy teaches us that the moment we stop inserting new energy into a system, combined with a healthy dose of discontentment and lack of curiosity about our current state, we begin the long, slow slide into irrelevance. This has never been more evident than in our current fast-paced global marketplace. Studies have shown that 96% of businesses fail within ten years of their startup, making it imperative that companies act today. Organizations need to fight this threat by encouraging and developing a culture focused on continuous improvement or, in Lean terminology, to establish a learning or kaizen mindset. Nowhere is this more important than in the IT value chain. The IT industry is currently facing a growing risk gap where IT shops can t scale fast enough to close the widening gap between the rate of business demand and the speed of IT delivery. There are many contributing factors responsible for this gap, including the growing complexity of IT delivery models through increased use of third-party suppliers; consumer-driven expectations for on-demand, streaming and instant-on; an evergrowing backlog of work-spawned technological changes; the inability of fragmented and silo-oriented processes to keep pace and external market drivers that pressure IT to shorten the time to market, lead times, etc. Some of the major challenges being faced by organizations today include: quality, efficacy and cost of IT services. The question is: how can kaizen help optimize IT service delivery capabilities to be better, faster, and cheaper? This white paper will outline five important things leaders should know about the practice of Lean Kaizen and how applying a kaizen approach can positively impact your organization. pinkelephant.com P a g e 2

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4 The first step for a problem-solving mindset is to establish a desired state of the service or process; secondly, understand the current baseline and gap; and finally, work to incrementally close the gap towards the chosen state by implementing kaizen improvement steps. The goal of kaizen is to have everyone s mind focused on improvement all the time. This mindset change will impact the hundreds or thousands of decisions being made within an organization at the keyboard level every day. When the implementation of kaizen is aligned with a common vision, these keyboard decisions can be made more effectively. Successfully adopting a kaizen mindset will give organizations a competitive advantage by proactively finding and fixing their own problems. 2. There are two types of kaizen: Kaizen Event or Daily Kaizen A Kaizen Event, which may also be referred to as Improvement Kaizen, is when a problem in a process has been identified as needing improvement and a team is pulled together from across various work areas or departments for an intense two- or three-day workshop to resolve the problem. One of the most important factors to consider is selecting an effective leader/facilitator and the right mix of representatives from across the organization. A Kaizen Event involves bringing in stakeholders involved in a cross-functional process where the problem has yet to be defined, improvement requires a cross-functional approach and the solution is not readily discernable. A Daily Kaizen is when an individual or small group of people from the same team continuously examine the environment in which they operate and, on a daily basis, identify problems and change dynamics to make it easier for stakeholders in the environment to deliver a consistently high-quality service that provides customer value quickly and efficiently. A Daily Kaizen is best understood as a problem and improvement opportunity that is low or no cost and is within the purview of an individual or a single team to improve within the timeframe of a single day. In this case, a cross-functional team is not required and the complexity of the improvement opportunity is low. In order to implement kaizen, it is important to have the knowledge, skills and methodology to identify, plan and implement incremental service and process improvements. Lean and Six Sigma provide specific tools and improvement techniques to identify, analyze and improve problems. pinkelephant.com P a g e 4

5 The essence of using either type of kaizen is that identifying problems and solving their root cause drives individual and organizational learning. 3. Kaizen is a subset of Lean IT. The central focus of Lean IT is assessing a process to eliminate waste, where waste is defined as something that adds no value to a product, service or output. The ultimate goal of Lean is to provide perfect value to the customer through a flawless value-creation process that has a target of zero waste. This goal is enabled by kaizen, which is focused on continuous, incremental improvement. Often, in situations where kaizen hasn t been adopted, an IT worker will work as hard as they can and technically complete their work to the best of their ability. But, if they weren t given the context for their task, the end-product often won t meet the need for which it was intended. One of the tenets of kaizen is to ensure that context is understood and that the system provides the conditions in which the work can be successfully completed to align with the desired outcome. 4. A Kaizen Event is inclusive it isn t limited to one area or function within an organization. The challenge we face today is that many current organizational structures, performance management systems, processes and tools are oriented in respect to vertical technology towers. This means many IT leaders look for ways to locally optimize their own processes and tools by department or IT group, but don t look at optimizing the flow of the enterprise value streams. Many organizations may also have separate strategies for each technology tower without considering the full system s performance. Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through the entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets and departments finally reaching the customers. Silo vs. Systems Mindsets The missing piece in a lot of technology organizations is that individual workers don t see the end-to-end system because they are diligently working away in their respective pinkelephant.com P a g e 5

6 functional silos. In many instances, the workers don t deliver the desired level of quality the first time not because they didn t want to, but because the system they re working within is so siloed and disjointed that they don t have the knowledge with which to work differently. A task-oriented organizational structure often promotes isolation instead of collaboration. Workers are often specialists a good analogy to demonstrate this is having a worker who specializes in producing specifically-designed car bumpers. When the bumper is finished, it is perfect except for the fact that the design of the vehicle was tweaked so now the completed bumper no longer fits but no one had notified the bumper specialist! The implementation of both Lean IT and kaizen should enable organizations to take control of processes and improve the efficiency of any value stream. 5. Lean & Kaizen have been embraced by DevOps. Originally created to span the interests of both development and operational teams, DevOps is now a term used to describe the multiple elements that all work collectively to increase the quality of IT while also increasing speed and reducing costs. IT organizations are now focusing on optimizing the full IT value chain. DevOps is the sum of Lean, Agile Development and Continuous Delivery models and encompasses all their values, principles, practices, teaming models and tools. The kaizen mindset, which falls under Lean, is therefore part of the multi-layered, sequenced and interdependent processes, frameworks and practices that comprise DevOps. pinkelephant.com P a g e 6

7 About Pink Elephant We Lead The Way! A premier global training, consulting and conference service provider, Pink Elephant has an undisputed reputation for leading the way. We re proud of our pioneering and innovative spirit, which has enabled us to introduce and spearhead many revolutionary concepts and programs since our inception forty years ago. About The Author Troy is considered by many to be one of the world s foremost ITIL and ITSM experts. A passionate and experienced Executive Consultant, Troy is always willing to use his rich and extensive background to share what he knows, and is always on the hunt for more knowledge. Troy always has his finger on the industry s pulse if there s a question about what the latest trends in ITSM, Lean, Business Relationship Management or Organizational Change Management are, he has the answer! Troy is a frequent speaker at ITSM events, a contributing author for several books focused on ITSM and Lean IT concepts, and his blog is one of the industry s most popular and informative. Contact Us PINK info@pinkelephant.com ITIL is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved. pinkelephant.com P a g e 7