Mark P. McDonaldLean principles are all the rage. Cutting the fat and reducing waste are leading people to affixing ‘lean’ to everything: lean manufacturing, lean process management and recently lean-IT.
Lean principles were originally applied to manufacturing processes and since IT is a process many of these practices apply.
Eliminating waste, what lean calls ‘muda’, is the essence of Lean thinking. Lean highlights seven sources of waste. How ‘muda’ applies to IT are the subject of this post.
1. Overproduction – making things before they are needed is a source of waste. In IT overproduction comes when IT builds solutions or provides capacity that is in excess of the business requirements.
2. Waiting – the time and resources consumed in between major steps in a process. In IT waiting happens in areas like user signoff, requirements definition, testing, and other areas. Waiting comes from multi-tasking that often comes from trying to fully-allocate IT resources.
3. Transporting – the unnecessary movement and handling of work. This happens when you pass work between multiple teams, multiple companies and locations. A lack of clear process, poor coordination tools and weak management raise transporting in IT.
4. Inappropriate Processing – involves resource overkill, also known as ‘gold platting’ solutions. Over-provisioning service levels, taking on extra requirements or building beyond business needs are IT examples of this form of waste.
5. Unnecessary Inventory – in manufacturing the concern is Work-In-Progress (WIP). In IT the resources tied up working on multiple concurrent projects. Remember that active five projects means five investments and no results. Shorting cycle time and increasing throughput reduces the amount of WIP.
6. Unnecessary / Excess Motion — refers to the unnatural acts that people are made to perform in doing their job. In IT excess motion can he thought of the ‘hero’ actions that are common in IT. Whenever you need a hero you are requiring excess motion.
7. Defects – errors are the common focus of improvement disciplines like six-sigma. In IT defect removal concentrates on verification, validation and testing.
Muda matters in IT and every CIO and IT executive should look at these sources of waste in their operations and plans.
Category: budgets Leadership Lean Thinking Tags: IT budgets, IT management, Management
5 responses so far ↓
1 Joseph T. Dager September 17, 2009 at 11:00 pm
Nice article and a good reminder.
2 Puneesh Lamba September 18, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Thanks for the article Mark. To me. it is not that easy to just identify the Muda activities and start removing them even with the help of IT. For instance, Overproduction might be classified as Muda but it can be part of a strategy where 1) you want to increase the efficiency of manufacturing operations by manufacturing a single product in large batches and 2) to improve customer service levels for a particular niche product – I understand that both these steps will increase inventory but if a well thought strategy calls for certain compromises to achieve pre-decided goals, then it is still worth it.
3 Mark McDonald September 19, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Puneesh, thanks for your comments. The article was aimed at pointing out the sources of muda that are present in IT. I agree that overproduction that is part of a plan would not be waste — it is part of the plan. But its important to note the full cost of such a plan as overproduction requires additional inventory, materials, storage, and pricing risks that will not be taken into account if you just look at the average production cost per unit.
I believe the point with Muda and Lean in general is to identify the areas of waste that are not connected to the plan or source of competitive advantage. One mans muda is another mans differentiation, but only if that is a conscious decision and not an artifact of past history.
4 Avisek Roy September 20, 2010 at 1:18 am
Hi Mark. Thanks for sharing details on Lean IT. While MUDA is one area that is picking up fast now days, there are a couple of other agenda’s – like the MURA and MURI, unexplored. That is one thing I am waiting to see – on how it touches on IT.
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