On-Site Lean IT Consulting
We at Oxzigen Lean IT Consulting are dedicated to providing our clients with practical solutions backed by experience and cutting-edge research. Our goal is to help your teams become more productive and efficient within the context of your existing organization and processes. We don’t require that you throw out everything you’re doing now. We start with where you are today, and then apply tested techniques of incremental, continuous improvement. After discussing your needs and goals for the engagement, we can propose a course of action that fits both your budget and your timeline. Through our network of strategic partnerships, we are able to provide a broad range of expertise, but we can also partner with your in-house staff or other external vendors.
Introduction to Lean IT for Executives
This class is normally offered as a 1-day course, but we can provide a more limited, ½-day version if that is a better fit for you. In it, we’ll briefly review the key figures and milestones in the development of Lean, then we’ll dive a bit deeper into some of the theory behind Lean IT, and then we’ll spend the rest of the time discussing practical applications specific to the challenges facing many IT organizations. We will draw on case studies and recent research. If time permits, we can facilitate further discussion among the group on a topic of particular concern to your organization. This course is most appropriate for directors and above.
Personal Kanban & Kaizen Coaching for Executives
Kanban and Kaizen is not just for teams. The same principles can be applied to improve personal productivity and effectiveness. Personal Kanban is a great way to keep focused, making sure that you are working on what matters most and finishing what you’ve started. Personal Kaizen is a gradual, but effective way to make incremental improvements in any area of your life.
Kanban Coaching for Teams
We can provide hands-on coaching to get your team up and running quickly and effectively with Kanban. Typically, we will spend 1-4 weeks (depending on team size) working with the team and then transfer ownership of the process over to an existing team member, or we can arrange to provide a long-term coaching resource. We recommend that at least some of the team members already have training or experience with Kanban. If not, however, we can start off the engagement with our 2-day Kanban Workshop (see below).
Kanban Training for Software Development
This workshop is typically offered as a full 2-day program. It can be run either as a private in-house training class or as a public class. The private classes can be tailored to the specific needs of your organization. The public classes will be offered periodically and listed here on the events section of this site. This class is designed for anyone directly involved in the software development process, including development managers, architects, project managers, developers, UX/UI designers, QA testers, and requirements analysts. It provides a thorough introduction to the theory and application of Lean, Just-In-Time (pull systems), and Kanban to the software development process. Participants will learn how to construct a kanban board to make the current process and flow of work visible, set limits on work-in-process to adjust throughput, discover and implement incremental improvements, and measure the effectiveness of their efforts.
Kanban Training for IT Support and Operations
This 2-day course covers the same material as our course for Software Development (see above), but is tailored to meet the needs of teams providing IT administration, deployment, maintenance, support, configuration, and procurement. The course would be appropriate for systems managers & administrators, release managers & engineers, help desk managers & support staff, infrastructure managers & engineers.
Kaizen Training Workshop
This 2-day workshop provides an intensive introduction to the theory and practical application of Kaizen. We’ll review how to discover and eliminate various forms of “waste,” how to use the core problem-solving tools of Lean, and how to integrate it all as part the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) improvement cycle. This is an interactive workshop. We will use a case study (which can be tailored to your industry) to demonstrate the application of the tools and techniques.
Kaizen Event Facilitation
A Kaizen Event, sometimes referred to as a Kaizen Blitz, is an intense 3-5 day workshop intended to address a specific, urgent problem facing the organization, or to brainstorm and implement radical improvements to a specific function or process. We can help with the preparation, facilitation, and documentation of the event.
For more information, you can download our chapter on Kaizen Blitz from the new edition of The Problem Solving Memory Jogger: Seven Steps to Improved Processes.
