Lean IT is considered the adaptation of Lean and the Toyota Production System concepts to the environment of information technology and software development, being correctly integrated into the business.
It also promotes actions that benefit the development cycle and project management. Lean IT allows managers to be more attentive to the information technology sector to achieve better results by adapting the concepts applied on the factory floor to a software development environment. Lean IT promotes positive impacts on the industry with its central idea and principles. Keep following our publication and learn more about the positive impacts of Lean IT!
The Lean Philosophy, Emergence, And Concepts Of Lean IT
“Lean” is a term that has become popular because it characterizes a set of concepts that make up the philosophy developed by Toyota through the Toyota Production System. This system revolutionized the industrial production landscape by addressing issues such as the way of being, thinking, doing, and living of its employees, aiming at their maximum productivity in the professional environment and their lives.
In the Toyota Production System, Lean aimed to increase efficiency, avoid waste as much as possible and improve manufacturing and waiting time for products or services. In terms of management, it manages and develops products and services using the resources necessary to carry out that stage or process. The five principles of Lean are:
- Add value to the customer with products or services that focus on the consumer;
- Having a value stream that looks at the process ultimately;
- Have a continuous flow so that operations continue to operate even if there is some limitation;
- Having a pulled production, where the customer dictates the pace and avoids waste as much as possible;
The search for perfection brings the idea of ​​continuous improvement of products and services to customer satisfaction.
Lean IT
Each of these principles brings with it a set of tools and practices that, in a way, are already known in the IT world, and that had their birth in Lean or suffered some influence from Lean, such as Scrum or Kanban management methodologies, in addition to Cubit and ITIL. In the world of information technology, the need to integrate the sector into the business to generate more value for its customers has promoted a change in the work culture that seeks to apply better concepts that bring real benefits.
The Positive Impact Of Lean IT On Software Development
Implementing the Lean IT philosophy and its principles is a long process that demands time and commitment from the entire management body and employees. One of the benefits of Lean IT is precisely at this point, which does not require a drastic initial change. Lean promotes continuous and incremental changes, which can also be understood by applying its philosophy and the difference in the company’s culture.
The Principles Of Lean IT
One of the first points to work on is knowing the waste in the world of IT, which can range from outdated customer requirements to hardware that no longer meets the level of excellence required by the company. After analyzing the wastes, it is clear that they create a distance between the business areas, which must be fought to create a value chain throughout the company, integrating the work effort and dynamism to the maximum in the activities carried out.
It is also ideal to choose a work methodology such as Kaizen, Kanban, or ITIL and Cubit. The idea here is to have a management aid tool that unifies how employees and managers measure software development. It is also important to define metrics relevant to the business and the IT sector, choosing those valid for the organization.
Always keep in mind continuous process improvement with a long-term point of view to avoid wasting resources and time and creating bottlenecks. The goal is to identify existing problems, eliminate waste and detect work that does not add value to the business.
Finally, it is essential to maintain and take care of the infrastructure as a whole, especially in an environment as fast and agile as IT. Correctly sizing IT assets and assessing the need for each one and their lifetime and maintenance periods can be an essential factor that will both avoid excesses and cause bottlenecks in the process.
