Successfully applying lean practices to IT has lead Gerrie Electric to high throughput, improved processes and cost savings.
Can manufacturing based Lean tools be applied in the front office? Specifically in IT? An IT department needs to believe in zero defects. They need to maintain infrastructure. They need to manage projects. The must provide direct service for internal and external customers. More importantly, they need to understand customer value and cut non-value activities throughout the organization.
We will tell you a story of how we took an IT group in disarray and turned them into a world class team. We will share some of our early discussions with the group about a vision for IT and zero defects. We will discuss our progress and problems implementing 5S, an incident management system and a project system. Every IT system change at Gerrie Electric now begins with a value-stream map. We have started to survey Gerrie employees to measure how close we are coming to our vision statement. We will also discuss the current challenges of managing change, expectations, vendors and investments in IT.
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