PR 59 - LeanIT - Gaining Sr. Leadership Buy In

Enabling Leaders To Make A Difference & Teach Others To Do The Same Most Sr. leaders have a clear vision about what they want to accomplish and where they want to go in respect to their strategic goals. Many have a solid plan for how to deploy the changes they wish to accomplish. However few Sr. Leaders understand how to effectively make their plans a reality coupled with the ability to sustain them after they are no longer engaged. LeanIT offers a set of principles, thinking models and tools that provide Sr. Leaders with the skills and knowledge they need to accomplish their objectives. However, the challenge is how to convince them that LeanIT offers tangible methods to accomplish sustainable results. In this episode of Practitioner Radio George and I speak with Mike Orzen who is a co-author of LeanIT; a popular and Shingo Prize winning book on the subject of applying Lean principles to IT Services and Processes. Show Notes:

  • Special Guest — Mike Orzen
  • LeanIT Book
  • LeanIT winner of the Shingo Prize
  • Lean a Business Improvement Model now being applied to an IT Context
  • The Elevator Summary: “Creating value for the customer with the least amount of effort required.
    • Doing the work right, complete, accurate the first time (Quality)
    • Least Amount of time necessary (Delivery Time)
    • Focusing on Quality and Delivery Time we get (Flow)
  • Lean Summary from Mike Orzen
  • Lean also means getting on the “Lean Scale” looking for waste starting with an assessment
  • Lean is about changed behaviors: Problem Solving, Transparency of Issues, Alignment of Leadership, Management and associates
  • Lean environments generate an atmosphere of trust and no-fear
  • In many IT Environments it is better to look good as opposed to being good “Blowing Sunshine Upstairs”
  • Go To Gemba — getting to the ground level and seeing challenges at the source
  • Bottom Up — Top Enabled Successful Transformation
  • Gorilla Lean with the collation of the willing
  • Developing a center / island of excellence
  • Improvement In Stealth mode — wining the ability to sell up
  • 75% of LeanIT Opportunities do not have a company wide Sr. Leadership commitment
  • Make sure you pick LeanIT Projects that will be your poster children
  • Kaizen Improvement (personal, department, process, system)
  • People say and do exactly what their bosses focus on most frequently
  • The beliefs and practices of Leaders / Bosses have a huge implication on whether lean projects are successful
  • Process Frameworks such as COBIT describe the right things to do (effectiveness) — Lean focus on doing the right things at the right level. (efficiency)
  • Adopting best practices with out Lean thinking puts the design at risk of being over engineered.
  • Lean Approaches can be applied to any discipline (cyber security example)
  • Questions to ask Leaders:
    1. Are you getting the results you need?
    2. Are you maintaining the ability to sustain those results?
    3. Are you able to attract and retain great people?
    4. How do your people feel about coming to work and recommending your company to other for employment?
  • Lean is about:
    1. Getting results
    2. A Culture of trust and respect
    3. A Culture of continual process improvement & daily team based problem solving
    4. Alignment of purpose
  • Lean is more about improving throughput and speed of value delivery versus cutting costs
  • Lean Leaders and Management need to do the following: Eliminate Waste, Teach Others to do the same
  • Lean Leadership:
    1. Clear Vision of the goal
    2. Leaders Have a Plan to deploy the goal
    3. Leaders and Managers set a behavior based examples for others to follow
  • Three steps to get Leaders to move forward with LeanIT
    1. Get the Leaders involved in the assessment
    2. Get some of the leaders involved in the analysis and planning
    3. Use a rapid cycle deployment model for everything you do (2 weeks max to deliver results)
  • Lean gives you a concrete CSI Method and thinking process
  • Three Questions to ask as part of your LeanIT efforts
    1. What are we doing now that we doing now that we need to stop doing?
    2. What are we not doing now that we need to start doing?
    3. What are we doing now that we need to keep doing?

Troy's, George's and Mike's Thoughts What Are Yours? ““Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” ~(Harvard Business School definition of leadership)” To subscribe to Pink's Podcasts on iTunes

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