Leveraging Lean for IT and research tran...

In 2012, the IT division of a U.S. national research and development laboratory with over 4,500 staff began their Lean IT journey. After working with Mike Orzen, a pioneer in Lean IT, the organization is learning to embrace small incremental change, trial and discovery, and value the answer to the question “what did we learn?” There is an metaphor that says, “the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time,” but our tendency is to bite off more than we can chew often leading to failed deployments, partially or improperly built solutions or...

Lean Data Center: A Telco Experience

Service Providers are complex organizations with several departments like IT, Service Support and Innovation. Andrea shared lessons from several Lean cases within Telecom Italia, the Italian leading Telco Service Provider. The experiences regard the Lean Data Center initiative and improvement of the Product Service Delivery and Service Assurance Processes. Andrea presented the approach he used and how he notably tailored Lean tools to a data center environment, the impact on people and the results he obtained. Specific issues of service environments were highlighted such...

Lean at support functions: from steering...

We hear a lot about optimizing (horizontal) value stream. However, the horizontal flow is quite determined by the efficiency of (vertical) support functions like HR, Finance, Quality, Purchasing, Staffing, etc. We decided to not accept it as given constraint and dig into it by triggering Lean@SupportFunctions initiative. We aim to improve the integration of the internal flow into the value stream and make the internal support functions value driven and business aware. In this presentation we share the results and experiences of applying the same Lean approach to the...

Lean Software Factory – Applying The Toy...

In 2011, Bouygues Telecom built a “software factory” to deliver software for its “boxes” (IPTV set-top boxes and internet routers). A Software Factory is a combination of tools and methods to promote automated building and testing, with a focus on configuration management. Since then, we have started a transformation journey, combining the ambition of agile software development and lean product/management culture. This talk focuses on the “factory” metaphor, since we have found that the way the software is built is as important as the software product itself...