"Lean Manufacturing" for Information Technology

In our work with one of our clients and one of our partners, additional exposure came to light for the interest in using "lean manufacturing" methodologies for our industry.  

During the early part of the last decade, one problem that many individuals faced in our industry was lack of technical knowledge of the decision makers.  Because the decision makers did not have a grounding in the industry, it took considerable amount of time to educate them to help them make a decision.

Let's consider a simple example. Go back in time to 2002.  Envision that you are a network administrator and you realize that the processors on your primary server (which is five years old) is a key bottleneck to moving data to and from employees.  After you do the research, you find a Dell server with current a processor (and RAM) for $5,000.  You go to your manager (who is the CFO of your company) and share with her the benefits of increased work speed that will result from the $5,000 investment.  All she hears is $5,000.  Being that America is in the midst of a recession, what your CFO hears is "$5,000".  You know what doesn't happen next.

Fast forward to the next recession.  It is 2009.  Now you are the CIO.  Your network administrator comes to you with a $15,000 investment to virtualize your server environment.  You immediately understand the benefits and sell the President of the company on making this investment.  And it gets made.

Now that we have managers in our industry who have a background in information technology, we are ready for "lean  manufacturing".   Some of the methodologies used are ITIL for service management and Agile for applications development.

It is exciting seeing our industry maturing to the point where we are starting to complete more projects on time and within the budget, respond to customer's needs more readily, make decisions faster, and create more quality applications. 

From a training perspective, we are seeing this play out in the demand for programs to help I.T. professionals.  For example, we are working on several projects.  They include:

• Project management for a software as a service company
• Training on project management software for an international manufacturing company
• Agile training for an international distribution company
• Training on a web based document management software for a local networking company