IT associates are more than capable of responding to this kind of challenging work. They possess the aptitude for deep analysis and reflection that is required to make significant Lean improvements. All that is needed is a willingness to try. The first step is to make the time to involve IT in Lean activities. Lean IT is an untapped goldmine just waiting to be unearthed!
Friday, March 25, 2011
What is a Lean IT Organization? Interview with Mike Orzen
IT associates are more than capable of responding to this kind of challenging work. They possess the aptitude for deep analysis and reflection that is required to make significant Lean improvements. All that is needed is a willingness to try. The first step is to make the time to involve IT in Lean activities. Lean IT is an untapped goldmine just waiting to be unearthed!
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Who Is Responsible for Quality?
This week we’re going to take a break from talking about Agile in IT operations so we can examine quality in IT.
When Edward Deming, the Grandfather of Quality, taught his methods to the Japanese in the 1950's, he was working with a group that had historically been known for poor quality. Invited by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers to assist Japan in their post-war reconstruction efforts, Deming taught Japanese management, scholars and engineers to focus on quality in order to produce world-class results and become competitive in world markets.
Japanese Leadership
During his early lectures, Deming quickly realized that quality cannot be sustained unless an organization’s leadership focuses on its importance. Initially, he lectured plant managers and engineers who had no authority to implement change. When Deming consulted with his Japanese hosts, they understood the problem and arranged for him to speak to about 100 top-level business leaders.
Deming instilled in these leaders a sense of responsibility for quality in their organizations. He maintained that, ultimately, quality is created in the boardroom and is the responsibility of top management. With senior management supporting quality efforts, the Japanese companies and economy would flourish.
Japanese Success
Deming predicted that Japanese companies would export their products all over the world and companies in other countries would be clamoring for trade protection from the Japanese within five years if they followed his recommendations for improving quality. Although the Japanese business leaders did not initially share his vision, they did as he instructed so they would not lose face. Japan surprised the world with their success and even beat Deming’s prediction by a year.
You probably know the rest of the story regarding Japan's success and what American organizations had and still have to do to catch up with Japanese firms. American firms confused quantity with quality. Demand for American goods was so high in the 50's and 60's the American manufacturing companies assumed this translated to quality for the customer.
However, this misconception was created from the great economies of scale available to American companies due to the war engine. At the time, the United States was the only country in the world which could produce at levels necessary to meet demand. As soon as Japan could both meet demand and offer higher quality, American companies fell behind in world markets.
Putting Out Fires
I have found that many IT organizations function similarly to the manufacturing model that existed before Deming’s quality movement. They judge the quality of their product, IT services, by the demand for that product.
For example, when a system goes down and IT team members scramble to get it working again, companies reward this behavior by praising the heroes who got up in the middle of the night to fix the issue. These individuals are suddenly visible and valuable. They are motivated to continue putting out fires rather than to improve system stability. The incentive to become system arsonists is greater than the motivation to create quality systems.
Continuous improvement is a hard sell for some IT professionals because doing a quality job means nobody notices IT. The better the systems run, the fewer chances there are for heroics. A quality IT group is almost invisible.
Deming’s 14 Points
Below are Deming’s 14 points for management transformation. They were originally published in Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming.
Although the 14 points were written for a manufacturing scenario, try to translate the recommendations into ideas for an IT team. Following these points in your IT group can help you focus on making quality everyone's responsibility.
1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
11. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.
12. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.
Deming’s 14 points transformed manufacturing into a quality-focused delivery system. The same benefits can be realized in IT, creating continuous improvement in IT processes and products. When quality is built into your IT systems you can increase the value of your department to the business, decrease time spent on downtime and reduce the load on team members who have to fix problems caused by a lack of quality.
The Journey Toward Quality
I realize I am not giving much in the way of suggestions for translating the 14 points into action but I would encourage you to study how you can facilitate making quality core to your business.
All the excuses you will hear from your team about why these 14 points won’t work in IT are probably the same excuses manufacturers made before they made the shift to quality. The arguments have already been made and overcome and the benefits of following the 14 points have been clearly demonstrated.
If you haven’t started the journey toward increased quality and would like help, feel free to reach out to me. I can provide you directions to start. Good luck!
Patrick Phillips and Jen Browne
Friday, March 11, 2011
Leveraging Agile Principles in IT Operations: 2 of 4
The Documentation Monster
On the other hand, it can save a significant amount of time when troubleshooting. It can foster knowledge transfer. It speeds the learning curve for new hires trying to find their way around your systems. It can be integral to a good disaster recovery plan.
Document Key Information
- Reducing troubleshooting time
- Sharing knowledge
- Training new hires
- Supporting disaster recovery
Maintaining Working Systems
Examine your system. Is it mature? Do you have instrumentation in place, including telemetry, monitoring and alerting, failure detection, and comprehensive, readable logs? Does it fail gracefully? Is it designed for recovery? Are the necessary high availability sub-systems in place? These are the foundation for maintaining working systems. Identify your gaps, prioritize them and create a plan for putting them in place.
Document as You Go
Instead, document as you go. When a team member is working on a standard tasks – deploying, fixing and maintaining – use the opportunity to look at the system from a documentation standpoint as part of the standard task. Refer back to the ways your group will use the documentation as a guideline to creating it.
Looking Ahead
Jen Browne and Patrick Phillips
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Leveraging Agile Principles in IT Operations: Part 1
Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools
Agile Overview
“Agile” refers to a set of methodologies that focuses on iterative and incremental software development, emphasizing collaboration between cross-functional teams. I was recently asked by a CEO to explain the value of using Agile principles in IT operations, a group that doesn't typically embrace Agile tools and processes.
At its foundation, relating Agile to IT operations rather than to the development world, where Agile was founded, means understanding the differences between the needs of a group that follows a pattern of planned work (software development) and a group that is largely interrupt-driven (operations).
The Agile Manifesto lists four main precepts:
- · Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- · Working software over comprehensive documentation
- · Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- · Responding to change over following a plan
In this series of blog posts I will discuss how each precept can bring value to the responsibilities of your IT operations team.
Traditional Frameworks
When seeking an organizational approach, there are compelling reasons behind constructing an IT department using an ordered framework such as ITIL or MOF. This approach locks the team into a safe, prescriptive approach that is hard to fault. It reduces the need for personal judgment and critical thought while defining roles and responsibilities, offering a clear trail for audits.
However, there are associated drawbacks. Frameworks don’t foster creativity. They’re often top-heavy, requiring a great deal of time and effort to implement and maintain. Additionally, overlaying a framework on a disorganized IT team won’t create useful process and can bog down the team when implementing the framework, rather than providing structure for the department, becomes the goal.
Structured frameworks also fail because they don’t foster continuous improvement. Even though root cause analysis is often included within the framework, the step that remediates the root cause and creates process improvement is frequently not addressed. Thus the value of understanding the root cause is lost.
Individuals and Interactions
Fortunately, you can reap the benefits of a structured framework and create opportunities for continuous improvement in your IT operations team by following Agile’s first precept: individuals and interaction over processes and tools.
The processes and tools that your IT operations team uses, including the organizational framework, should be driven by the team’s values rather than the desire to watchdog productivity. Focusing on individuals and interactions puts a framework into perspective; it becomes a set of guidelines that support the team rather than setting the framework itself up as the goal.
The concept of individuals and interaction over processes and tools also forms a philosophical stance for the management of teams. Trust your IT team. Many IT people are intelligent, internally-driven professionals who want to find ways to improve department processes and customer service. If you don’t trust your team, get a different team, either by getting different people on the bus or by shifting yourself to a new bus. Using processes and tools to lock down the behavior of team members as a substitute for trust can be disheartening for teams and is an ineffective management approach.
Looking Ahead
In part 2 of this series I will address the second precept of the Agile Manifesto, working software over comprehensive documentation, and discuss how it applies in an IT operations environment.
Jen Browne and Patrick Phillips
About Me
Popular Posts
-
What Makes Your Product Valuable? Journey on the Value Stream - Part 3 on Organizational ImprovementIn our previous discussions I introduced concepts around how to start organizational change from a com...
-
Large and small corporations, both in high-tech and traditional industries, now owe most of their value to inves...
-
Let me first define what this post isn't. This post is not arguing that you should not lean up through automation (Although Deming wou...
-
Have you ever heard someone say "Well we need to change the culture to fix that?" All to often when an organization is beginning...
-
I n my previous blog post Waste Is Everywhere and It Starts With You I discussed that constructing enterprise transformations are dif...
-
Part four of this blog series on initiating change in the organization through Future State Mind Mapping and the e...
-
Arguable one of the greatest wastes in corporations past and present is the gross underutilization of people’s talents skills and knowled...
-
The proliferation of process methodologies has not only made the traditional form of managing more uncertain, but has greatly increase...
-
Five years ago, less than 25% of business leaders rated their organization ’s IT function effective at delivering the capabilities the...
-
When Edward Deming, the Grandfather of Quality, taught his methods to the Japanese in the 1950's, he was working with a group that had...