For those of us who worked in the IT sector it is not surprising that IT
projects enjoy only 20% success rate. Successful projects are the projects that
are delivered on time and IT projects are rarely delivered on time. After learning
about Toyota’s lean manufacturing I couldn’t help but wonder whether these
techniques could be applied to an IT project.
This is
when I came across an interesting IEEE paper on how a 9 person development team
employed by BBC worldwide applied lean idea behind Toyota production system to
their development project. The development team at BBC worldwide employed the
lean methods including visual management, team-based problem solving, smaller
batch sizes, and statistical process control to improve software development.
The team adapted lean principles in the following ways:
·
The team started by
drawing all stages of development life cycle (value stream maps) onto the
kanban boards and recorded the work at each stage on cards and placed on the
boards. This exercise made the team realize that there was more Work in
Progress (WIP) and more bottlenecks of work than previously realized and
therefore put restrictions on WIP allowed at each stage. The team then kept the
levels of (WIP) like requirements, designs, and code, as low as possible in
order to create continuous flow and increase problem visibility. These measures
helped in improving the process and eliminate waste.
·
The team pulled work
into software development system when they had capacity to work on it. They
worked with the users upstream to smooth future demands and Level out the
workload. Also, after the team realized that poor defect fixing hindered
productivity and product reliability it tried to build a culture of stopping to
fix problems
·
The team actively
looked for “blockers” and insisted that all work was handled through the agreed
process. Just like there are andon lights displaying the status of production
at any time in Toyota production lines, Information radiators and kanban boards
were placed around the work space to ensure transparency of project progress
which promoted self-managing among the team members.
All these
measures implemented over a period of 12-month, helped improve lead time to
deliver software by 37%, consistency of delivery by 47%, and defects reported
by customers fell 24%.Overall , this is a great illustration of how principles
from one industry can be successfully applied to another. But, the question is
whether it is possible to apply these techniques to all IT projects of
different levels of complexity and team sizes ?
References:
Good correlation.
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