IT services and processes are highly suited for optimization using a Lean Six Sigma approach. The inherent drive towards continuous optimization in ITIL and the excellent alignment principles of MOF are very well complemented by Lean Six projects*. The frequent misunderstanding of performance metrics and effective optimization in IT departments, coupled with the abundant management information handily collected by ticketing tools makes this area of the business a prime candidate for some black belt attention.
A practical example:
A certain mature and successful service provider supplies helpdesk services, system administration and infrastructure as a service to a customer, a large and professional organization. During the tender phase certain reporting standards and KPI's were agreed upon. The service is managed by these metrics, with the provider paying a malus fine whenever average performance falls below certain levels. These levels are defined and agreed in a separate service level agreement.
After a year it is clear that the services, on average, are provided at or above the agreed service levels, but that the occasional breaches in incident resolution time are a significant source of dissatisfaction for the customer. The service provider knows the traditional method to improve service in this area is to add resources to the team that resolves incidents, but this is expensive since the customer pays a fixed fee and the margin of the provider relies on resolving incidents cheaply.
At the customer's urging, the service provider brings in a team of Lean Six Sigma experts to see if there is a better way. The team knows very little about service management, but a lot about process optimization. The service provider watches with interest as the problem is defined, large amounts of data are requested and fed into spreadsheets and some over-caffeinated sessions ensue where one variable after another is scrutinised.
A few surprising truth emerge from the project. Instead of adding resources, the service provider is better served by re-architecting their incident management process to lower the time it takes to resolve incidents by a just few minutes each. Lowering the error rate of the resolver group turns out to be very important as well. Both of these findings are meticulously researched and presented to the supplier's management team.
It turns out that lowering the error rate and the process cycle time of the incident management process correlate very strongly to performing within agreed service levels, and to lower costs per incident. Adding resources to the pool actually turns out to have little effect on resolution time, and has a negative effect on the cost per incident. In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense to the service provider. After all, once there are enough resources to handle a regular workload, adding more people means that some of them will have little to do most of the time, and the team will be bigger, more complex and more costly.
Also, the project finds that the already low error rate of the service desk is a bottleneck. Errors engender a lot of confusion and necessitate double work, greatly increasing the time it takes to resolve the incident. The project digs into the factors that affect the error rate and find it can be lowered by creating more knowledge items for the service desk. These provide technical information and checklists to ensure incidents are resolved correctly.
By using Lean Six Sigma to optimise the service, specifically the all-important incident management process, the service provider gets far more than a happy customer. It matures beyond using a standard remedy for a common problem. Instead, the issue is managed by calmly considering the facts, gathering the relevant data and improving the aspects of the service which cause a bottleneck in the process flow. In this case, decreasing the time it takes to go through the process by a few minutes and unlocking more knowledge for employees turned out to be powerful solutions which would not have been found or implemented otherwise.
This example perfectly illustrates the value of 'Lean Six' for Service Management. Service levels are dependent upon many, often indirect variables. Customer satisfaction often has little to do with 'three nines' uptime, which needs to be taken for granted. Cookie-cutter solutions really are not good enough in the highly competitive IT industry.
An outside-in view is the hallmark of a successful Lean Six Sigma project. By targeting the customer's dearest wish (resolve all incidents on time), considering supplier-side constraints (cost per incident), crunching the data on actual performance instead of agreed performance levels this project found the way to deliver the desired result, every single time. This is the sweet fruit of applying management science to the IT department.
*: Jack Probst and Gary Case published an excellent whitepaper on integrating Six Sigma and ITIL to practice continual service improvement way back in '09: http://www.best-management-practice.com/gempdf/sixsigma_itil_csi_wp_july09.pdf
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