Jiri’s Notepad

One of the books I managed to read over the summer holiday was Lean Thinking. I will cover more in my future posts, but for the starter I wanted to write about the Lean Thinking approach to business change. Although this change approach was developed with the purpose of introducing ‘lean’ into manufacturing organisations, I believe its steps are generic enough for it to apply to introducing change in other contexts. Like enterprise architecture, for instance.

I have spent most of the last year introducing basic enterprise architecture disciplines for a large multi-national company. The big architecture approach with its truckloads of documentation is toast, and something that my hard-nosed and cost-conscious customers would never go for and so we had to find an alternative approach. After reading the Lean book, I was surprised how closely the steps we had taken resembled the change blueprint described by Womack & Jones.

The situation I have been in is probably not too unusual, and so it may be useful to understand what the Lean approach to change is about. Below are my notes on the steps of the lean change approach and their application to EA:

1. Find a change agent. Change agent is not the person pushing the change (I assume this will be done by yourself), but someone who will sponsor the change. Someone in a position of authority. Best people for this are CIO, CTO, IT Delivery Director for technical EA aspects; or Chief Strategy Officer/COO, if you are more into business architecture. This person needs to be fully behind what you plan to do - not only in words but also in action. If he is not willing to extend the time he has in exec board meetings and his credibility to your cause, change your scope, get ready for partial success or leave straight away.
2. Get the knowledge. Unlike Womack & Jones, I would do this as a first step. Without a knowledge of the subject matter area, you will not be able sell the concept to your sponsor in the first place and if so, he is likely to get buyer’s remorse and pull out at a later stage.
3. Seize the crisis, or create one. Find an issue that will allow to rally the support from the appropriate stakeholders or help create a customer demand that will force the change.
4. Forget grand strategy for the moment. Leave your Zachman books in the drawer and focus on resolution of the issue in a way that lays the structure for the future and that delivers apparent practical value. Prepare an outline of what you want to cover beyond this first step.
5. Map value stream. Understand your current process and its pain-points. They could be whatever – inconsistent process, major capability missing, bad or un-enforced contracts, lack of specific skills. Alternatively, you can look at portfolio of existing systems for inconsistent product standards, systems with duplicate functionality or underserved business niche for opportunities for solution-lead projects.
6. Begin ASAP with an important and visible activity. When evaluating the gaps, target areas that are simple but very visible to both people on the ground and senior folks and is relatively easy and quick to fix . Make sure the change becomes part of business as usual rather than a one-off. If you have time, do a bit of strategic planning, preparing a vision of where you ultimately want to get to and the list of possible next steps.
7. Demand immediate results. This presumes a correct choice of subject and pain-points to be fixed and ongoing support of your sponsor. Blaze through to implementation and get results quickly. The last thing you want to do is to be handling several years of implementation issues plus the opposition of people with a stake in maintaining status quo.
8. Extend scope as soon as you get momentum. Use the vision/outline strategy, refine to communicate the need for a more thorough approach to your stakeholders. If you you go for a big-bang change, hire people to help you. If you are taking contibuous improvement, look what is the next pain-point, increasing the stakes from the last time. You changes can now go as deep and as far as the goodwill you created in the previous step takes you.

So what is Lean approach to EA about? The approach is great fit for environments that are focused on cost-control and getting a hard, demonstrable value. It uses guided tactical steps that are building up a momentum towards a more strategic approach.