Lean approach: also in Tech fields

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How to take advantage of Lean IT in your business?

Are you wondering how to apply Lean IT aspects on your business and how to take advantage of it? Strategic alignment is the answer.

The importance of an aligned business.

Strategic alignment requires commitment to the lean system at all levels of the company. When everyone is coordinated and moves towards the same objectives, it is way easier to accomplish the mission of the company, which needs to be understood by all stakeholders.

The process of creating, communicating, deploying and aligning a strategy is crucial, and the lean body of knowledge has tools and methods to address this, referred to as strategy deployment.

Strategy deployment refers to the translation of the organization’s goals into short-term actionable plans. When all of this is correctly applied, enterprise excellence is achieved.

Therefore, the main objective of strategic alignment is to coordinate the company’s aim with the actions of everyone in the company, and there are four clear steps to achieve it

• Step 1- Develop the plan: all separate projects within a business need to be in line with the main strategic plan of the business supporting a common future vision.
• Step 2- Deploy the plan: measurable objectives and plans have to be set in every level lined up with the organization’s purpose, objectives, and strategy, without time waste.
• Step 3- Monitor the plan: measurable objectives allow to detect when things are not going well. Carefully monitoring and adapting your strategic alignment and improvement process is one of the most powerful features of your lean system.
• Step 4- Improve the system:  Strategic alignment is about creating a vertically aligned system of continuous improvement. Making things visual, meaningful measures, standard work, and structured problem solving combine to detect, check, and adjust the means as necessary.

  However, this it is not an easy task, and managers have to be really careful when applying Lean IT into their businesses in order to succeed and be open to learn from mistakes.

IT brings perspective to business process improvements.

The main goal of integrating Lean It on businesses is to end with the traditional functional silos.

When organizations operate with a localized perspective and behavior, and measures center on departmental performance, efficiency, and cost control, people don’t focus on the performance of the entire value stream, which, at the end of the day, is the most important.

To sustain Lean improvement, everything in a business needs to revisited with a systems thinking perspective and a focus on customer value.

Most managers used to a traditional business won’t be able to see things from this point of view, it is important that business recruit some IT professionals with knowledge of Lean IT principles and tools, who will bring a new perspective and understanding, contributing to business process improvement