There is a strong contrast between the traditional management view of spare time and the kanban view. Traditional managers1 view spare time as something to avoid, as a sign of inefficiency or even laziness. One important responsibility of such managers is to keep workers busy. In contrast to this, network queuing theory—and kanban in particular—show […]
value stream
When is a kanban tool not a kanban tool?
An indicator of the increasing popularity of kanban is the number of software tools and online services that claim kanban functionality. For those practitioners who have seen the tremendous benefits of kanban, this should be a gratifying development. But what does it really mean for a tool to support or to enable kanban? And what […]
Lean configuration management: a conundrum
How does a purely internal activity like configuration management add value to customers? Would a customer gladly pay you for your configuration management activities? Keeping your configurations under control is hardly value adding in the same way as, for example, increasing the utility of a service. And yet, good configuration management underpins virtually all service […]
Lean Incident Management
A vicious cycle in incident management Lean incident management is the resolution of incidents in a manner respecting lean principles. Being lean allows us to significantly reduce the extent of the control activities in the process and the number of organizational roles created to exercise those control activities. For, I have often seen a vicious […]
On value streams, chains and life cycles
There is confusion among the three concepts of a value chain, a life cycle and a value stream. We see this both in feedback on my recent article on a value stream for service management and in many other places. I believe it is useful to treat them as different concepts, so I will try […]
A Value Stream for Service Management
One of the main benefits of a lean/kanban approach to IT is the simplification of processes expressed in the value stream of each team. But IT teams are sometimes indoctrinated with process frameworks coming from approaches such as COBIT® or ITIL®. They may be at a loss to understand how a single value stream can […]