Cool workshop: Lean IT from Lean Enterprise Institute

Lean Enterprise Institute Offers Lean IT Workshop in Chicago on September 16

Mike Orzen and Steve Bell will be teaching a workshop on application of Lean techniques to IT, based on their experiences that they wrote about in their upcoming book Lean IT – Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation.

I've been having a great deal of fun recently working with Mike Orzen on codifying the prescriptive steps the business and the IT organization must follow to simultaneously increase the throughput of features into production, without causing chaos and disruption to the IT production environment.

I view this work as helping fill in the some needed blanks in the work that I've been working on with Kevin Behr and Patrick Debois.

I believe this work will be of great interest to the #DevOps community, as it will help provide a bridge to the over 160K Lean practitioners (who are due paying members of the famous Lean Enterprise Institute).  They could be a valuable set of champions and consultants to help in DevOps projects.

(By the way, the founders of Lean Enterprise Institute are some of my biggest heros.  They wrote the book The Machine That Changed The World: The Story Of Lean Production. Their work on benchmarking automotive plant performance helped shape all the work that we did to benchmark over 1500 IT organizations.)

More information on this workshop can be found at http://www.lean.org/Workshops/WorkshopDescription.cfm?WorkshopId=52.

When an organization enters a Lean transformation, weaving the principles of efficiency and respect into a culture of continuous improvement, too often the IT department is either left out or viewed as an obstacle. Whether you are improving a manufacturing service line or adopting electronic medical records, incorporating IT into the Lean transformation can make or break it.

To explore the dimensions of Lean IT and its importance to sustaining Lean transformation, Lean Enterprise Institute (www.lean.org) will offer a one day Lean IT workshop September 16 at the Hyatt Regency Woodfield – Schaumburg in Chicago.

Participants will explore both internal and external IT operations:

• Internal: IT operational excellence, including the application of Lean to Service Management Framework and ITIL, Software Development (Agile), and Project Management.

• External:  the role of quality information, effective information systems, and an engaged IT organization, to support the continuous improvement of business processes. The workshop includes hands-on exercises, applying many Lean tools (A3, Value Stream Mapping, root cause analysis) to an IT problem scenario.

By adding this workshop to their portfolio, LEI recognizes Lean IT as an important emerging discipline that supports Lean communities of practice in all industries, including health care.

To learn more follow this link:

http://www.lean.org/Workshops/WorkshopDescription.cfm?WorkshopId=52

LEI is a non-profit educational organization founded by James Womack, co-author of Lean Thinking, and Machine that Changed the World (where the term “Lean” was originally coined).

The instructors, Mike Orzen and Steve Bell, co-founders of Steady Improvement, and authors of “Lean IT – Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation” (scheduled publication September 2010), have been named to the faculty of the Lean Enterprise Institute.

An IT organization is expected to “align with the business.” That is, IT is supposed to enable business performance and innovation, improve service levels, manage change, take advantage of emerging technologies, and maintain quality and stability, all while steadily reducing operating costs. Yet when an enterprise begins a Lean transformation, too often the IT department is either left out or viewed as an obstacle. What is to be done? This book shares practical tips, examples and case studies to help you establish a culture of continuous improvement to deliver IT operational excellence and business value.

Reviews of their book:

“This book will have a permanent place in my bookshelf. In my ten-year study of high performing IT organizations, I’ve found that businesses rely on IT far more than they think. The impacts of poor flow from application development into IT operations can be devastating: ever increasing cycle times and amounts of rework, and an ever increasing amount of heroics required in IT operations to preserve the illusion of stability and reliability.”

—Gene Kim, Chief Technology Officer, Tripwire, Inc.; co-author of The Visible Ops Handbook and Visible Ops Security

“There has never been a more critical time to improve how IT integrates with the global business enterprise. This book provides an unprecedented look at the role that Lean IT will play in making this revolutionary shift and the critical steps for sustained success.”

—Steve Castellanos, Lean Enterprise Director; Nike, Inc.

“Twenty years from now the firms which dominate their industries will have fully embraced Lean strategies throughout their IT organizations.  Ten years from now those organizations will have started pulling ahead of their competitors as the result of Lean IT. Today this book will show those organizations the path they need to start out on. Will your organization be one of them?”

—Scott W. Ambler, Chief Methodologist for Agile and Lean, IBM Rational; author of Agile Modeling and Enterprise Unified Process

“This book goes both wide and deep in its exploration of Lean IT… a great survival manual for those needing nimble and adaptive systems.”

—Dr. David Labby, MD, PhD, Medical Director and Director of Clinical Support and Innovation, CareOregon

“This book makes a major contribution in an often-ignored but much-needed area. It ranges over a huge area – including excellent case studies – that will bring IT professionals into the Lean fold while enabling Lean managers to reach out to the IT organization.”

—John Bicheno, Program Director MS in Lean Operations, Cardiff University

“… a comprehensive view into the world of Lean IT, a must read!”

—Dave Wilson, Quality Management, Oregon Health & Science University