This was presented by Roger Brown and Peter Green at the Seattle Scrum Gathering on 5/17/11. Slides have been annotated with some discussion notes to provide additional context.

1. 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

2. CAN IT SERVICES BE AGILE?
This presentation is inspired by a
learning project at Adobe Systems, Inc.
Contact roger@moonriseconulting.com if
you would like to know more.
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3. LEAN PRINCIPLES
Minimize the time from order to cash
2. Map
1.
the
Identify
Value
Value
Stream
3.
5. Seek
Create
Perfection
Flow
4. Establish
Pull The five-step thought process for
guiding the implementation of lean
techniques is easy to remember,
but not always easy to achieve
- lean.org 3

4. IDENTIFY VALUE
2. Map
1.
the
Identify
Value
Value
Stream
3.
5. Seek
Create
Perfection
Flow
4. Establish
Pull
Specify value from the standpoint of
the end customer by product family.

5. SOURCES OF VALUE FOR ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS
$ Useful functionality
$ High system reliability
$ Quick system response
$ High quality
$ Ease of use
$ Good support

6. MAP THE VALUE STREAM
2. Map
1.
the
Identify
Value
Value
Stream
3.
5. Seek
Create
Perfection
Flow
4. Establish
Pull
Identify all the steps in the value stream
for each product family, eliminating
whenever possible those steps that do
not create value.

7. THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT VALUE STREAM
Scrum practitioners have focused on these activities
Sprints
? Product
Definition
Product
Development
Product
Delivery ?
Product Backlog Development and Frequent
Creation and Testing during Releases to
Release Planning Sprints Production

8. EXPANDING THE VALUE STREAM
Where does the Where does the
Product Vision Product go after
come from? delivery?
Product Product Product Product Product
Discovery Definition Development Delivery Operation
Innovation Games
Scrum DevOps
Pragmatic Marketing Mainstream
Customer Development
Leading edge Agile approaches
Who is missing?

9. DEVOPS
Release
Deploy
Development Operations
and
Done, done, done
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.

10. COMPLETING THE VALUE STREAM
Support is the interface
to the customer
Product Product Product Product Product Support
Discovery Definition Development Delivery Operation
Now we can start thinking
about optimizing the entire What Lean/Agile
value stream opportunities an
we find?
Bleeding edge for Agile Enterprises

11. WHAT IS SUPPORT?
Product Service
What is a Service?
 Activities, not tangibles
 Produced and consumed at the same time
 Customer is a co-producer
 Utility + Warranty

12. 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

13. 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.

14. THE NEW PERSPECTIVE
Treat Service as a system
and focus on capacity and capability
to achieve flow.
Economies of Scale
Economies of Flow

15. FINDING FLOW
2. Map
1.
the
Identify
Value
Value
Stream
3.
5. Seek
Create
Perfection
Flow
4. Establish
Pull
Make the value-creating steps occur in
tight sequence so the product will flow
smoothly toward the customer.

16. USER DEMAND
Story
Story
Story Where does it
Defect come from?
Story
Refactor
Story
Defect
Story

17. 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

18. FAILURE DEMAND
Failure Demand is the work that originates
in product mistakes, mishaps and Examples:
misunderstanding. • Help requests
• Code defects
• Usability problems
• Building the wrong features
• Insufficient security, speed, uptime
• Technical debt to hurry shipment

19. THE LEAN NO-BRAINERS
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.
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20. 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

21. 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.
ABOUT VARIABILITY • Look for patterns to leverage in prioritization and problem
solving
• Know the payoff function and the probability of success
• Cut your losses
Manufacturing Development Support
Unit Story Ticket
Unit Story Ticket
Unit Story Ticket
Story
Unit
Story Ticket
Unit
Story
Unit Ticket
In general, it is better to reduce the economic consequences of variability
than to try to reduce variability.
- Reinertsen

22. ESTABLISH PULL
2. Map
1.
the
Identify
Value
Value
Stream
3.
5. Seek
Create
Perfection
Flow
4. 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

23. PULL
Push
Push systems overwhelm capacity,
creating turbulence, waste and delay
♫
Pull systems have a steady flow that
provides predictability
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24. Demo
KANBAN
SIMPLE SOFTWARE KANBAN BOARD
Bottleneck Station
WIP Design WIP Develop WIP Test
To Do Limit WIP=2 Limit WIP=4 Limit WIP = 3 Done
Doing Done Doing Done
(Prioritized
Backlog)
Workflow
Normal Urgent Process Improvement
WI Types:
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25. KANBAN Prioritization
WIP Limits
Self Assignment
Incremental Improvement
Visual Management

26. Lean cadence supports variability in delivery cadence.
Development problems are large and need to be
CADENCE
decomposed. Lean supports problems are already small
but have different expectations of resolution (SLA).
Scrum for development Lean for operations
Decomposition
Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3

27. Goals for an Agile Organization
• Optimal value delivered to customer
SEEK PERFECTION • Consistent processes
• Measurable processes
• Collect usable knowledge
• Focus
• Trust
2. Map
1. • Continuous improvement
the
Identify
Value
Value
Stream
3.
5. Seek
Create
Perfection
Flow
4. Establish
Pull
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.

28. ABOUT PERFECTION
When does our process
reach perfection?
Perfection is never actually achieved.
The notion of perfection is itself subject
to a process of continuous improvement.
- Jonathan Snyder

29. REDUCING WASTE
The Seven Deadly Wastes
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

30. LEAN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT GOALS
Valuable Usable
Product Knowledge
• Patterns
• Institutional knowledge
• Knowledge sharing
• Learning Organization
Process

31. FASTER FEEDBACK
Demming Cycle

32. EXISTING FEEDBACK LOOPS TO IMPROVE
Release Help
Frequency Desk
Product Product Product Product Product Support
Discovery Definition Development Delivery Operation
Bugs
Reliability
Configuration
Performance
Compliance

33. NEW FEEDBACK LOOPS TO ADD
Support viewpoint, tools
Low value features Learning
Inefficient features
Product Product Product Product Product Support
Discovery Definition Development Delivery Operation
Help
Desk
Supportability features
Customer desires Feature ideas from customers
Emerging problems Usability issues
Wrong features
Missing features

34. INCREASE CUSTOMER INVOLVEMENT
Customer Validation
Product Product Product Product Product Support
Discovery Definition Development Delivery Operation
Customer Representatives
Focus Groups

35. 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.

36. REFERENCES
Anderson, D. J. (2010). Kanban: Reinertsen, Donald G. (2009). The
Successful Evolutionary Change for Principles of Product Development
Your Technology Business. Sequim, Flow: Second Generation Lean Product
WA: Blue Hole Press. Development. Redondo Beach, CA:
Beck, K., & al., e. (2001). Manifesto for Celeritas Publishing.
Agile Software Development. Retrieved Seddon, J., & O’Donovan, B. (2009).
from agilemanifesto.org: Rethinking Lean Service.
http://agilemanifesto.org/ http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/6-
Bell, S. C., & Orzen, M. A. (2011). Lean IT: brendan-jul09.asp
Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (1993). Lean
Transformation. New York: Productivity Thinking. New York: Free Press.
Press.
Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T., & Roos, D.
Grönroos, C. (2007). Service Management
(1990). The Machine that Changed the
and Marketing: Customer
World. New York: Macmillian Publishing
Management in Service Competition,
Company.
3rd Edition. Hoboken: J. Wiley.
Humble, J., & Farley, D. (2010). Continuous
Delivery: Reliable software releases
through build, test, and deployment
automation. Boston: Addison-Wesley.
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