I got the idea to write this post after a meeting the past week about Lean in the digital age. I had the privilege to meet up with twenty people from different corporations, and corporate cultures, to talk about Lean and the challenges we all meet working with IT solutions. As a meeting guide we hade Daniel T Jones, an inspiring author and beacon for getting people to recognize and draw benefits from the Lean thinking all around the globe. Out of respect for Daniel and other people in the Lean community, I write this post in English. I hope to get the language as close to correct as possible.
If you’re looking for the all-mighty answers to understand how Lean incorporates digitalization you have come to the right place, because here I can tell you that at the moment there is no clear answers. We are just at the beginning to understand how the rapid growth of digitalization and the industries supporting this development, should work together. Lean principles have the past years been successfully translated into the work environments in the car industry and the health care industry. Who haven’t these days heard about the successful implementation of Lean at any bigger hospital? My wife is a nurse so of course I have, and I promise you we have talked quite a lot about her daily routines, visualisation of work load and group meetings.
After the meeting I realised that there are a lot that IT departments and service providers within the tech industry needs to approach. The last years principles of efficient development processes concludes that “agile” seems good and using “scrum” lead by “scrum masters” is perhaps even better etc etc etc. Sometimes more hype about the word than about what exactly is being produced. Because in the end, what is it that we actually produce? At the IT department or at the Tech company? Why do our customers chose us instead of our competitors when what we deliver (awesome developers) is quite the same? And how about our total capacity in our delivery, is it at all defined? Do we know what bottle necks we have, do we know what limits our pace or accelerates it?
With all these questions I have only scratched the surface of the two giant areas of Customers/users and The Delivery model. I bet there are a thousand questions more to be answered before we can fully understand the potential of Lean in the age of digitalisation. I think I have found my way in how to proceed, and it’s all about experimenting. Put myself and my IT department outside the comfort zone and start dealing with the different challenges that appears (exactly, challenges, not obstacles…). And I hope to see a lot more of my friends and colleagues outside the comfort zone too.
