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Lean IT

Using Kanban to Succeed at Offshore Outsourced Development

As mentioned previously, the Product Owner (PO) is critical to the success of agile development, but even more so when working with offshore outsourced development teams, where communication is key in working up user stories. Challenge of Distance. The reliance of Scrum daily standups for each team member communicate what: User stories are done User […]
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Scrum’s Achilles Heel: The Engaged Product Owner

Many IT organizations, trying to emulate the pace and quality of software development by vendors, have tried to transition to Agile Development, typically going with Scrum, with varying degrees of success. In my experience when a traditional IT shop struggles with Scrum there are a few common factors that come into play: Dropping Scrum into […]
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The Fallacy of Water-Scrum-Fall

Most organizations start their Agile-Lean journey with Software Development, typically using scrum. This makes sense for a lot of reasons: The lean software movement started in programming with the seminal work of the Poppendiecks (2003 Lean Software Development). Developers are likely IT organization’s early-adopters, eager to stay current in their chosen field. There is neither […]
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Lean IT: The Key to Successfully Challenging the Status Quo…

The foundation of Lean IT is to focus on Value-Add Activities. The tool to get there?  Value Stream Mapping.   The key to execution and challenging the status quo?  Senior leaders in the trenches.   Going to Gemba. Our 3-day value stream mapping workshop requires senior leaders to walk through the physical workflow of their […]
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Lean IT – Start with the Value Stream Map

LEAN IT – Where to start? Speaking with Silver Tree clients about Lean IT, many quickly realize Lean IT will benefit their organization; which invariably leads them to ask the question where does an organization start? Glad you asked!   Silver Tree starts here. Define your customer and the goods and/or services they need/desire. What value-added […]
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The Continuous Improvement of ITIL Change Management

In my previous post I wrote how organizations can follow ITIL Framework guidance to drive continuous improvement of ITIL Service Management Processes, through the application of Lean IT thinking. In this post I will explore this further by discussing how the role of Change Manager is evolved when using the Lean IT practice of Infrastructure […]
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Leveraging the Value of ITIL through Lean IT

Many organizations rolling out an ITIL program have approached it in a prescriptive manner trying to drop “best practices” into their IT shops. The added discipline is invariably an improvement over most home grown ad hoc practices, however, as the ITIL literature makes clear, this flexible framework and best practice guidance for the Service Management […]
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Lean IT: Principles over Practice

In my previous two blogs I spoke of the importance of culture in achieving Lean IT. I wrote about why and how cultural change impacts the success of a program devoted to eliminating lead time in our IT Services. Starting with this blog I begin an effort to pivot to the mechanics of Lean IT. […]
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The Culture of Getting to Lean IT

In my previous post, I cautioned that organizations looking to Lean IT as an approach to cost reduction must embrace certain cultural changes to be successful. This post will propose some of the critical cultural behaviors required for successful Lean IT.   The first thing to recognize is that a strict command and control management […]
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