Fusing Lean, Six Sigma & ITIL

2008-01-10T09:42:00.000-08:00

Do we know what we don't know ? Confusing !!!!
Let me make it simple. For anything in question, either we know OR we don't know. This is simple. Now lets go a little deeper. There are two possibilities within what we call as we don't know; we know that we don't know OR we don't even know that we don't know. This is true even in IT Operations. There are a lot of processes we establish and we also improve then over and time again. We continue to patch them again and again to ensure availability, adherence to quality, transaction processing, simplification, standardization........ and lot more. With all this we have made our IT systems very delicate. What we try to take action on is what we know and what we question & search is on what we don't know. There are a lot more things that we don't question because we don't measure and hence we just don't know. This is what I refer to as we don't even know that we don't know.

IT Service Management (ITSM) gets simpler with implementing ITIL practices, then streamlining processes with Lean and finally improving process capabilities through Six Sigma. Together with ITIL, Lean & Six Sigma, ITSM explores into something that we never knew. ITIL defines a framework for ITSM and provides guidelines that help organizations with the industry best practices. With ITIL, the IT organization would be able to design the process flow and create detailed work instructions; in the way it benefits the IT organization goal by making use of the framework. Lean helps in identification of value stream map of any product challenging the waste in process and thus targeting continued takt time reduction. Lean focus on flow of value, identify steps that don’t add value and provides tools to eliminate them. Six Sigma helps is reducing the process variance (deviation from normal) thus improving the process capabilities based on statistical analysis focusing on quality improvement and operational cost reduction. It helps in defining a methodology for continually mapping, measuring, and improving the quality process.

The ITIL library
Configuration Management – Interrelation of assets
Incident Management - Restoration of services asap
Problem Management - Root cause analysis of problems
Change Management - Changes to eliminate problems
Release Management - Hardware/Software version releases
Service Desk Function - Managing call types and service requests
Service Level Management – Priorities/Severities
Availability Management - Service availability
Capacity Management – Performance standards
Financial Management - IT services costs
IT Service Continuity Management - Minimizing service disruptions
Security Management - Security of the IT Infrastructure
Infrastructure Management - Network, Operations & Systems Management
Applications Management - Software life cycle support
Security Management - Implementing security requirement & policies

LEAN
Lean focus on flow of value and helps identify steps that don’t add value and provides tools to eliminate them.
Lean thinking - Specify value; Map value stream; Establish flow; Implement pull; Work to perfection. Concept of Muda, Value Added & Value Enhanced - Value is a capability provided to a customer at the right time at an appropriate price, as defined in each case by the customer.

Muda - Everything that does not create value is waste.
JIT – Pull / Single piece flow / Takt time production
Jidoka – Stop at an abnormality / Autonomation
Heijunka – Leveling / Sequencing
Kaizen – Road to perfection.. continuous improvement
5S's – Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain

Six Sigma – DMAIC
The term Sigma is used to designate the distribution or spread about mean of any process or procedure. Sigma capability is a metric that indicates how well a process is performing. It is a capability of the process to perform defect free.
D – Define – Customer expectations of the processes
M – Measure – What is the frequency of defects?
A – Analyze – Why, when & where do defects occur?
I – Improve – How can we fix the process?
C – Control – How can we make the process stay fixed?

Fusing ITIL, LEAN & Six Sigma
ITIL – Establish service management and design process flow and detailed work instructions for processes. What of service management ?
LEAN – Establish value stream maps, identify the waste in the process and reduce takt time of the processes. How of process simplification ?
Six Sigma – Improve process capability for any process that has a deviation from normal & accepted variance. How of quality ?

Scope: Service Support segment in ITIL so that we could try a deep dive.
Any IT organization starts feeling the need for a organized IT service support mechanism as it grows and this is where we pick ITIL to implement the service support best practices. Most organizations have service desk, Incident , Problem, Change & Release management processes setup. It becomes very easy for all the respective individual processes to run pretty smooth and successfully. Even though ITIL has been around for so many years we don't have a single tool that has all these processes integrated because ITIL can't be practiced end to end as it is very subjective to the business need and also the need of the support mechanism based on the IT organization. Having said that, now take a look at the whole support strategy staying outside of the process stream. You will observe that the integration between Incident/Problem/Change & Release has a sure scope of improvement.
Now starts the need for customizations of processes and tools for different kinds of supports. Problems arise in different directions and have no direct linkage to the problem management. Changes are requested and approved adhoc. Releases between different IT systems impacting each other dependent IT environments. These are all expected to happen in a highly available shared and integrated environment. You already have teams handling incidents/problems/changes/releases, however you still feel the lack of coexistence in spite of the tools and processes linked.
For example, ITIL talks about Known Error database along with inputs from Incident/Problem management, but it does not specify how to develop those. Six Sigma tells how, but it doesn’t tell what to do.