Lean Will Work Here
Kevin Meyer over at EvolvingExcellence has a great article Lean Won’t Work Here. He points to an article in CIO magazine by Dean Meyer (no relation to Kevin Meyer) that describes all the reasons why Lean won’t work in IT. Dean (non Kevin) says:
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.
As Kevin (not Dean) points out, the problem is that Dean is fundamentally wrong. The to pillars of lean are to reduce the time to customer value and respect for the individual. The problems the article highlights are not problems with lean, but with the application lean.
The problem is not just that the management of many organziations don’t understand the point of lean, but that the consulting firms helping them don’t either. These resulting disasters further muddle the lean story. It’s no wonder that an industry that has this understanding has satisfaction rates below 30% with their service and fails to deliver projects to their customer up to 70% of the time. From the standpoint of Pragmatic Process Improvement, you have to focus your efforts where it will benefit the business. You can’t view process improvement distinct from value creation and human interactions. Despite what Dean Meyer represents, lean is completely aligned with both of these pillars.