LEAN STRATEGIES FOR

IT SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONS

Scrum Gathering 2011

Seattle

Roger Brown

CSC, CST Moonrise Consulting, San Jose, CA

Peter Green

Agile Coach and Trainer, Adobe Systems, Inc.

With assistance from

Jonathan Snyder, Adobe Systems, Inc.

and Jeff McKenna, Agile Action

© 2011 Moonrise Consulting, San Jose, CA

CAN IT SERVICES BE AGILE?

2

This presentation is inspired by a

learning project at Adobe Systems, Inc.

Contact roger@moonriseconulting.com if

you would like to know more.

LEAN PRINCIPLES

3

Minimize the time from order to cash2. Map

the Value

Stream

3. Create Flow

4. Establish Pull

5. Seek Perfection

1. Identify Value

The five-step thought process for

guiding the implementation of lean

techniques is easy to remember,

but not always easy to achieve

- lean.org

IDENTIFY VALUE

Specify value from the standpoint of

the end customer by product family.

2. Map the

Value Stream

3. Create Flow

4. Establish Pull

5. Seek Perfection

1. Identify Value

SOURCES OF VALUE FOR ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

$ Useful functionality

$ High system reliability

$ Quick system response

$ High quality

$ Ease of use

$ Good support

MAP THE VALUE STREAM

Identify all the steps in the value stream

for each product family, eliminating

whenever possible those steps that do

not create value.

2. Map the

Value Stream

3. Create Flow

4. Establish Pull

5. Seek Perfection

1. Identify Value

Product Definition

Product Development

Product Delivery

THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT VALUE STREAM

Scrum practitioners have focused on these activities

Product Backlog

Creation and

Release Planning

Development and

Testing during

Sprints

Frequent

Releases to

Production

Sprints

? ?

EXPANDING THE VALUE STREAM

Where does the

Product Vision

come from?

Scrum

Where does the

Product go after

delivery?

Product Discovery

Product Definition

Product Development

Product Delivery

Product Operation

Innovation Games

Pragmatic Marketing

Customer Development

DevOps

Who is missing?

Leading edge Agile approaches

Mainstream

DEVOPS

Done, done, done

Development Operations

Re

lea

se

an

d

De

plo

y

DevOps is one name for the growing field of Lean/Agile inspired operations practices. It seeks to break down the

wall between Development and Operations so that new product does not pile up unused and the challenges of

change risk and compliance can still be addressed. It leverages automation, virtualization and Agile Practices for

better communication and continuity between Dev and Ops.

COMPLETING THE VALUE STREAM

Product Discovery

Product Definition

Product Development

Product Delivery

Product Operation

Support

Support is the interface

to the customer

Now we can start thinking

about optimizing the entire

value stream

Bleeding edge for Agile Enterprises

What Lean/Agile

opportunities an

we find?

Product

WHAT IS SUPPORT?

What is a Service?

Activities, not tangibles

Produced and consumed at the same time

Customer is a co-producer

Utility + Warranty

Service

DISCUSSION: THE SUPPORT WORLD

Support Activities:

•Help Desk

•Failure Analysis

•Code updates

•System Monitoring

•System Configuration

•Bug fixing

•Incident Tracking

Challenges:

•Users expect rapid response to problems

•More people using more technology means more demand for help

•More products and versions to support

•Quarterly $ goals drive tight timelines

•Fragile, debt-ridden systems

•Management by time and budget, not value and quality

•Knowledge gained during emergencies is not retained

•Staff works in expertise silos

Opportunities:

•Responsive support pleases customers leading to more sales

•More “supportable” products have lower support costs

•Higher quality products have lower support costs

•More efficient and reduced demand saves people cost

•Fewer production disruptions escalated to development team

WHAT LEAN PRACTICES HAS YOUR ORG TRIED?

Lean Production Practices Often Applied to Services:

• Reduce average activity time (stop watches!)

• Heavy specialization (silos!)

• Resource Management (offshoring!)

• Stepwise forwarding (your incident record has 10 entries…)

• Standardization (support scripts!)

Focus is on activity and cost.Customers are frustrated.

Workers are de-motivated.

THE NEW PERSPECTIVE

Treat Service as a system

and focus on capacity and capability

to achieve flow.

Economies of Scale

Economies of Flow

FINDING FLOW

Make the value-creating steps occur in

tight sequence so the product will flow

smoothly toward the customer.

2. Map the

Value Stream

3. Create Flow

4. Establish Pull

5. Seek Perfection

1. Identify Value

USER DEMAND

Story

Story

Story

Defect

Story

Refactor

Story

Defect

Story

Where does it

come from?

VALUE DEMAND

Value Demand is the work that originates in

product discovery and improvement.Examples:

• Competitor features

• New technologies

• New ideas for products and features

• Customer requests for new functionality

• Payback of technical debt

FAILURE DEMAND

Failure Demand is the work that originates

in product mistakes, mishaps and

misunderstanding.Examples:

• Help requests

• Code defects

• Usability problems

• Building the wrong features

• Insufficient security, speed, uptime

• Technical debt to hurry shipment

THE LEAN NO-BRAINERS

19

We know about these from our Agile experience:

- Small batches

- Single piece flow

- Limit Work In Progress

The goal for your process

is items flowing through

the system at a

consistently high rate,

with no build up of

queues or work in

process.

DECENTRALIZED CONTROL

•Hire the right people

• Respect what they know and how they work

• Enable continual learning

• Give individuals autonomy to make decisions

• Use cross-functional teams where re-work occurs

• Align decentralized authority with centralized strategy

• Trust that uncertainty will be met more quickly by

knowledgeable, capable people

• Use explicit policies (team-defined and org-defined) to

aid trust in self-organization of teams

ABOUT VARIABILITY

In general, it is better to reduce the economic consequences of variability

than to try to reduce variability.

- Reinertsen

Manufacturing Development Support

Unit

Unit

Unit

Unit

Unit

Unit

Story

Story

Story

Story

Story

Story

Ticket

Ticket

Ticket

Ticket

Ticket

In Lean manufacturing, we work hard to eliminate it.

In product development we encourage it to spawn innovation.

In services, it just is. So we try to make the most of it.

• Look for patterns to leverage in prioritization and problem

solving

• Know the payoff function and the probability of success

• Cut your losses

ESTABLISH PULL

As flow is introduced, let customers pull

value from the next upstream activity.

Note: customer is the next downstream

process, not just end users

2. Map the

Value Stream

3. Create Flow

4. Establish Pull

5. Seek Perfection

1. Identify Value

PULL

23

Push systems overwhelm capacity,

creating turbulence, waste and delay

Pull systems have a steady flow that

provides predictability

Push

♫

Normal Urgent Process Improvement

WI Types:

Design

WIP=2

Test

WIP = 3 DoneDevelop

WIP=4

(Prioritized

Backlog)

Doing Done Doing Done

Bottleneck Station

Workflow

WIP

Limit

WIP

Limit

WIP

Limit

SIMPLE SOFTWARE KANBAN BOARD

To Do

24

KANBANDemo

KANBANWIP Limits

Visual Management

Self Assignment

Prioritization

Incremental Improvement

CADENCE

Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3

Decomposition

Scrum for development Lean for operations

Lean cadence supports variability in delivery cadence.

Development problems are large and need to be

decomposed. Lean supports problems are already small

but have different expectations of resolution (SLA).

SEEK PERFECTION

As value is specified, value streams are

identified, wasted steps are removed,

and flow and pull are introduced, begin

the process again and continue it until a

state of perfection is reached in which

perfect value is created with no waste.

2. Map the

Value Stream

3. Create Flow

4. Establish Pull

5. Seek Perfection

1. Identify Value

Goals for an Agile Organization

• Optimal value delivered to customer

• Consistent processes

• Measurable processes

• Collect usable knowledge

• Focus

• Trust

• Continuous improvement

ABOUT PERFECTION

Perfection is never actually achieved.

The notion of perfection is itself subject

to a process of continuous improvement.

- Jonathan Snyder

When does our process

reach perfection?

REDUCING WASTE

Manufacturing Enterprise System Support

Inventory Stale support requests, planned process improvements,

unreleased fixes

Extra processing Heavy process steps, meetings, work assignments, manual

reporting

Overproduction Standardization of responses, speculative process changes

Transportation Task switching, issue triage, offshoring, issue forwarding

Waiting Specialist bottlenecks, batch fixes for a hot patch, reproducing

environments and configurations, queue escalations

Motion Emergency fixes, handoffs due to specialization, log in to

multiple systems to test or research

Defects Lost knowledge, mis-applied fixes, out-of-date scripts,

Addressing symptoms instead of root causes, bugs

The Seven Deadly Wastes

LEAN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Valuable

Product

Usable

Knowledge

Process

• Patterns

• Institutional knowledge

• Knowledge sharing

• Learning Organization

FASTER FEEDBACK

Demming Cycle

EXISTING FEEDBACK LOOPS TO IMPROVE

Product Discovery

Product Definition

Product Development

Product Delivery

Product Operation

Support

Help

Desk

Reliability

Configuration

Performance

Compliance

Bugs

Release

Frequency

NEW FEEDBACK LOOPS TO ADD

Product Discovery

Product Definition

Product Development

Product Delivery

Product Operation

Support

Learning

Support viewpoint, tools

Low value features

Inefficient features

Supportability features

Feature ideas from customers

Usability issues

Wrong features

Missing features

Customer desires

Emerging problems

Help

Desk

INCREASE CUSTOMER INVOLVEMENT

Product Discovery

Product Definition

Product Development

Product Delivery

Product Operation

Support

Focus Groups

Customer Representatives

Customer Validation

AGILE ENTERPRISE MANIFESTO

We are uncovering better ways of developing enterprise business services by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Incentives for quality and value over time and cost

Agile organization over agile project methodology

Knowledge management over tribal memory

Economies of flow over economies of scale

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

- A work in progress by Jonathan Snyder,

Sr. Manager, IT Application Support,

Adobe Systems, Inc.

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http://agilemanifesto.org/

Bell, S. C., & Orzen, M. A. (2011). Lean IT:

Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean

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Press.

Grönroos, C. (2007). Service Management

and Marketing: Customer

Management in Service Competition,

3rd Edition. Hoboken: J. Wiley.

Humble, J., & Farley, D. (2010). Continuous

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through build, test, and deployment

automation. Boston: Addison-Wesley.36

Reinertsen, Donald G. (2009). The

Principles of Product Development

Flow: Second Generation Lean Product

Development. Redondo Beach, CA:

Celeritas Publishing.

Seddon, J., & O’Donovan, B. (2009).

Rethinking Lean Service.

http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/6-

brendan-jul09.asp

Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (1993). Lean

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Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T., & Roos, D.

(1990). The Machine that Changed the

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