“The cost of complexity is not linear but exponential, and it eventually comes to dominate all other costs.” - Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation
Have you seen the movie “The Founder?” It’s the story of how Ray Kroc stumbled upon a couple of brothers who were revolutionizing the fast food industry. It’s a fantastic movie and worth watching.
McDonald’s Speedee System
So what does McDonald’s have to do with IT? A lot, actually. McDonald’s is a prime example of modern service delivery. You may run an IT company, but your real differentiator is your service. Great service experience is built on speed and efficiency.
There’s a scene in the movie where the McDonald brothers excitedly share how they transformed the production flow of the kitchen to condense the wait time for a burger from the typical 30 minutes to 30 seconds. The secret to this massive change in speed can be credited to lean principles. You can watch the video explaining their Speedee system here.
Lean IT
They essentially stripped the kitchen down to zero, figured out the most efficient flow of staff and components, then custom built the kitchen to match their new model. This is at its heart the principle of lean methodology. Find the waste in your systems and eliminate the fat.
Complexity is easy. Efficiency is hard. Complexity requires no analysis. You can continue to pile on systems, compensating measures, and additional requirements. This is how bureaucracy and inefficiencies are born. It takes a braver and more determined mind to strip that complexity down to its core, re-examine all its parts, and question the value of every step.
Your Lean Opportunity
I challenge you to apply lean thinking to some of your internal processes. Start with something specific:
Ticket triage. How many handoffs does a ticket go through before someone actually works on it? Map the flow from the moment a request hits your board to the moment a tech starts resolving it. Every handoff is a delay. Every delay is waste.
Workstation deployment. Can you write out every step of building and shipping a workstation, then cut the fat? Where are you waiting on approvals that add no value? Where are you repeating steps that could be templated or automated?
Client onboarding. What’s the waste in spinning up a new client user? How many people touch that process, and how many of those touches are actually necessary? If three people are involved in creating an account that one person could handle with the right checklist, that’s lean opportunity staring you in the face.
It can be anything. Start small, then go wider and constantly challenge yourself and your team to think critically about all of your systems. How could they be leaner?
The Compound Effect
Lean thinking compounds. 1% improvements month after month create a massive impact on your business efficiency and ultimately your bottom line. You won’t see the difference in week one. But six months of consistent process questioning and waste elimination will fundamentally change how your operation runs.