The IT industry is going through a profound shift based on market pressures it has, in one sense, helped to create. The speed and cultural expectations that have evolved from an Internet/streaming economy have created a business culture and expectation which requires unprecedented levels of agility to remain viable – let alone profitable. This has created a downstream impact on internal and external IT providers, who must find ways to optimise the way they process requests and deliver services.
However, one might argue that the need to move faster has always been a constant pressure. While this is true, there are relatively recent, unique factors that have kicked this requirement into high gear over the past three years. In this IT, we have a closer look at Value Streams to to deal with this pressure.
Lean and systems thinking teach us that any process/value stream is constrained by its bottlenecks. To even identify where these bottlenecks exist in a system, one must be able to visualise the IT value streams in order to identify areas of blockage.
The challenge with this is that traditionally, IT has not been optimised from a value stream orientation. Instead, IT has been focused on localised and domain optimisation, based on vertical, silo-based technology towers. While the lifecycle concept of Plan- Build-Run has been around for a dog’s age, and frameworks such as ITIL®, TOGAF, and COBIT® have provided systems thinking context and examples, the governance of IT has been fragmented by the technology domain.
This means very few IT Leaders look at optimising the flow of the enterprise value streams, but instead look for ways to optimise Plan-Build-Run activities as distinctly different focus areas. Look closely and you will see that many organisations will have separate strategies for each technology tower without considering the full system’s performance.
This fragmented approach to governance increases complexity as organisations increase the variability (Mura – a Japanese term used in Lean processes) inherent in establishing different processes, suppliers, and technology strategies to address the issues of growing demand. This increased complexity and localised variability comes with the expected impact of creating more opportunity for waste, defects, rework, and error – all of which conspire to impact the organisation’s ability to scale and accelerate.
To compensate, IT professionals have been kicking in the extra effort, capacity, and time to keep the flow moving by working evenings and even forgoing their weekends to deal with release or support issues. This is not a recipe for long-term sustainability on many levels. Beyond the harmful impact on people’s personal lives, this type of unhealthy system drives burnout, from trying to do more than is possible. IT professionals, regardless of their skill and goodwill, are unable to create more time in the day to continue to compensate for fragmented systems. To use an old saying: “You can’t get more blood from a stone.”
Two factors are influencing a company’s ability to realise customer objectives at a competitive speed: the increasing rate of demand and the stagnant rate of supply. Any reasonable consumer of a service will quickly begin to look at alternative suppliers if they realise that a company has an increasing backlog of work and long queue time before their request can be addressed. Simply put, tell me I have to wait several weeks/months for my urgent request to be handled, and I’ll need to look somewhere else for a solution.
We see this in the increasing use of directly purchased cloud services, contracted third- party IT services, and the funding of increased shadow IT functions. All of which, unfortunately, continue to add to the complexity and decreasing speed of the overall IT value system.
To compensate for this growing pressure, IT organisations have finally begun to focus on optimising their horizontal value streams as a complete system by completing Lean IT Kaizen improvements. They’re turning to the principles of Lean, which are focused on quality and flow. Lean principles have, in turn, spun up the practices of Agile software development and recently, DevOps. All of these concepts have one thing in common: speed.
As a speaker, consultant, and author, if you were to ask me what the topics of conversations around the IT water cooler were five years ago, I would have quoted you words such as availability, risk, compliance, reliance and maturity. However, the language of today has drastically shifted from those terms to focus on words such as agility, flexibility, performance and velocity. We’re seeing a complete pendulum swing from one side to the other based on the challenges I have outlined in this post.
We have to find a way to deliver on requirements for both speed and quality. “Better, faster, cheaper” implies that we continue to deliver quality – just with more efficiency. In order to achieve this, we must reverse the increasing complexity of our organisations by identifying, standardising, and automating our IT value streams.
We need to understand how work flows from request to its fulfilment in order to identify bottlenecks, remove waste (Muda), and manage WIP for optimal flow. To do this, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel; we just need to understand that in order to accelerate our businesses, we need to accelerate the IT management processes that have been well documented in frameworks such as ITIL and COBIT, and take advantage of the opportunity to standardise processes and services.
In short, the IT industry is finally waking up to the fact that localised (or siloed) optimisation is not going to take us where we need to go, or allow us to deal with the speed imbalance of supply and demand. Leading with Lean principles means that we recognise that our Lean IT value streams have to be optimised for flow. Practising Lean or Agile means that we aim to improve them every day.
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