Wouldn’t It Be Great If…
Dans le monde des opérations informatiques, nous sommes constamment tiraillés entre la mise en œuvre de nouvelles technologies, le maintien de l'éclairage et la résolution de problèmes non planifiés. Dans le feu de l'action, nous sommes constamment en train de générer des idées pour automatiser, standardiser et améliorer nos processus (par exemple, "Ne serait-ce pas génial si...."). Nous savons que si nous pouvions passer moins de temps à essayer de tout maintenir à flot, nous pourrions consacrer plus de temps à apporter de la valeur grâce aux nouvelles technologies. Nous connaissons l'importance de pratiquer l'amélioration allégée (Kaizen) - mais que faire lorsque l'urgent l'emporte sur l'important ?
Have you ever heard the phrase, “We are too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet”? If we don’t take the time to improve our environment, we’ll constantly face the same tedious challenges — and those challenges will keep growing, creating a mountain of technical debt. If we don’t practice Lean improvement, we’ll never be able to reach the level of sustainability or predictability that would make our lives a whole lot easier.
Luckily, because we visualize our work in Planview AgilePlace, we have a place to document our ideas for Lean improvement — which helps us actually do them. Visualizing these ideas alongside our project, maintenance, and break-fix work helps us keep them top of mind, and allows us to find ways to prioritize important improvement work. Keep reading to learn how we balance our Lean improvement efforts with our regular workflow.
Lean Improvement in Practice: A Step-by-Step Guide for IT Ops
Contrairement au travail de projet planifié, pour lequel des parties prenantes externes comptent sur vous pour obtenir des résultats, les efforts d'amélioration Lean sont faciles à laisser tomber.
Lean improvement efforts often fall victim to the “out of sight, out of mind” fallacy. If we don’t visualize our ideas for improvement, we’re likely to forget about them (until, of course, we face the same struggle).
Kanban can be a really helpful Lean improvement tool. If we want Lean improvement ideas to be as important as daily work, we need to treat them like we would our daily work: By putting them on a card and placing them in our backlog to be prioritized.
It’s not enough to simply create cards, though. If we want to practice Lean improvement, we need to build a Lean improvement process into our regular workflow. Here are some Lean improvement methods we use so that we make sure we properly manage urgent — and important — work.
Create a Kaizen Lane
Commencez par créer un couloir sur votre tableau pour les idées. Assurez-vous que cette voie n'est pas votre voie de dépôt par défaut, car cela pourrait affecter votre rapport d'analyse pour le débit et la vitesse. Créez un type de carte Kaizen/Improvement.
Record the “Why?” Behind the Idea
Second make sure the idea has a why statement around it. It’s easy to create a card that says “Make patch management more automated” but that doesn’t explain why you want to improve patch management. Putting the “why” in the description helps communicate the value of this idea. Without a “why” statement, it’s likely that your improvement ideas will get trumped by more urgent work — we have to effectively communicate the urgency of our improvement work.
For this example, the “why” could be: “Patch Management is a manual process that is prone to errors and takes x hours per month.” “Why” statements help to prioritize ideas, and ensure that anyone reading the card can understand the need you are trying to solve.
Discuss in Standups
Next, dedicate time to discuss Lean improvement (or Kaizen) cards during your standups. If someone on your team has slack time, see if they can pull an improvement card. Discuss how you could break improvement work into smaller increments of value, so the team can begin to experience the value of that work as quickly as possible.
Build In a Staleness Test
N'oubliez pas que l'immobilisme peut entrer en jeu. Veillez donc à réexaminer le pourquoi de chaque idée avant de la mettre en œuvre, surtout si elle a pris la poussière pendant un certain temps. Ne laissez pas votre équipe perdre l'habitude de discuter des cartes kaizen - à court terme, elles peuvent sembler moins importantes, mais à long terme, éviter ces opportunités d'amélioration peut entraîner une dette technique/organisationnelle importante.
Intégrez un test de caducité dans votre processus d'amélioration Lean : Fixez une date pour la durée pendant laquelle une carte peut rester dans votre couloir d'amélioration/Kaizen. Si la date arrive et que la carte n'a pas bougé, supprimez-la. Ne le mettez pas dans un tableau d'arriérés, supprimez-le. Si c'est vraiment important, cela reviendra.
What to Do When Urgent Trumps Important
The push and pull of IT Ops work can be grueling, and it’s easy to feel discouraged when urgent work seems to always get in the way of the improvement work — which could help eliminate the urgent issues. This is why it is critical for IT Ops teams to learn how to plan, prioritize, and manage improvement work. Start by visualizing improvement work alongside other work. Hide nothing. Communicate the value of your improvement ideas to your team, and make sure those ideas are heard in standups. If an idea becomes stale, delete it to make room for the most pressing improvements. This will help you create a healthier, more stable environment that will ultimately enable you to add more value to your company.
Lectures recommandées
To learn more about Lean improvement methods and tools, we recommend these resources:
- Continous Improvement in Lean
- Comment démarrer avec l'amélioration continue
- 3 Questions Every IT Ops Person Hears (and How to Answer Them)
