Lean IT Value Streams: Making IT Better, Faster, Cheaper
The IT industry is undergoing a profound shift, driven by market pressures that demand unprecedented levels of agility to stay competitive. This need for speed has created significant challenges for IT providers, both internal and external, as they seek ways to optimise service delivery while maintaining quality and efficiency.
Localised Optimisation in IT Value Streams
Lean and systems thinking teach us that every process is constrained by bottlenecks. To identify these in IT value streams, it’s essential to visualise the entire process. Traditionally, IT hasn’t been optimised this way. Instead, focus has been placed on localised or domain optimisation, often within siloed technology towers. This fragmented approach has prevented IT leaders from viewing enterprise value streams as a whole, leading to inefficiencies.
An Unsustainable Model for Managing IT Complexity
This fragmented governance increases complexity, creating more variability and waste. IT professionals often compensate for these inefficiencies by working overtime, but this approach is unsustainable. Burnout becomes inevitable, as people cannot create more time to deal with increasingly complex systems. As the old saying goes, “You can’t get more blood from a stone.”
Balancing Supply and Demand in IT
Two factors heavily influence a company’s ability to deliver on customer objectives: increasing demand and stagnant supply. As backlogs grow and service queues lengthen, customers turn to alternative suppliers, including cloud services and shadow IT functions, adding further complexity to IT systems.
Lean for Better, Faster, Cheaper Value Delivery
To address these challenges, IT organisations are adopting Lean IT principles, focusing on quality, flow, and optimising horizontal value streams. Lean practices, including Agile and DevOps, aim to improve speed and efficiency without sacrificing quality. By identifying bottlenecks, reducing waste (Muda), and managing work-in-progress (WIP), IT teams can standardise and automate processes, aligning with frameworks like ITIL and COBIT.
Lean IT Value Streams: A Path Forward
The IT industry is finally realising that localised optimisation won’t address the growing imbalance between supply and demand. Adopting Lean principles means optimising IT value streams for better flow and continuously improving them to meet business needs.
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