Lean IT Enterprise Transformation

Efficient and effective execution of the IT function within enterprises is a crucial enabler to business agility.  In a business climate where competition is increasing and the pace of value-delivery and product innovation is necessarily high, continual improvement is essential.   CxO's typically rank process and capability improvement among the top priorities, with 2012 continuing the trend.  

The recent momentum towards "Lean Thinking" and "Agility at Scale" are proving very attractive to organizations currently.  However, achieving such an end-state has proven elusive in industry to date, where organizations attempting improvement initiatives only succeeding 30% of the time.  

The shift to Lean implies process integration within and beyond Enterprise-IT organizational boundaries.  However, due to the scope of the software supply chain, enterprises are typically perplexed by the sea of IT Industry methods, bodies-of-knowledge and process frameworks.  Coupled with their large volume,  primary delivery practices and their associated communities manifest differing philosophies that may result in process silos and local optimization.  Similarly, current risk management standards-of-care and compliance frameworks can lead to large order waste when isolated from a value-stream perspective.

We believe a key root cause to the historically poor change results is due to the lack of integration and collaboration that exists today within IT.  All too common and yet unnecessary is the adversarial relationships and passive aggressive behavior stemming from "the flavor of the month" when it comes to approaches for delivering IT value.  The silo'ing of organizational micro-cultures or "tribes" can be seen to negatively impact the goals of "optimizing the whole". 

Leveraging our assets focused on materially improving the success rates related to major transformation initiatives, our consultants can facilitate true, accelerated change for your organization.  Instead of focusing on the typical slide-ware and 12-step program that every other competitor sells, we leverage our expert system that distills down modern IT delivery knowledge to enable a sustainable and actionable environment for change to occur.  While our consultants apply business process improvement frameworks like Lean, Rummler-Brache, Six Sigma and Theory-of-Constraints in a pragmatic manner, the change is supported to collect actionable change data such that the transformation is empirically based, and improvement investments like coaching and training are focused and based on concrete in-flight observations about how the organization is progressing.  

The following are key capabilities in this area: 

• through the Software Development Practice Advisor (SDPA) Expert System and related assets, we leverage a strong and credible basis for enabling a strong, coherent cultural evolution and capability improvement,
• our expert system facilitates transformation at scale in a cost-effective manner such that hiring an army of coaches and consultants is un-necessary,
  
• we leverage extensive visual reasoning experience in driving a systems thinking understanding for
  the transformation; knowledge and tools such as Rummler-Brache, ToC, Erricsson-Jacobson and UML
  
• we apply deeply rooted understanding of Lean principles and practices to Business and IT operations,
  
• we are positioned to establish traceability among the various levers of performance such that process improvements 
  can be measured ongoing within a Kaizen culture,
  
• we leverage broad experience with the technology landscape, and the constraints of current approaches 
  and solution sets.