Making IT Lean

42  ◾  Making IT Lean: Applying Lean Practices to the Work of IT

variety overloads the capacity of the system. Where there are bottlenecks,

there are also likely to be backlogs. In a Help Desk, these are represented

as queues, and while queue management is customary and accepted in

most every IT shop, the OM perspective encourages us to ask the ques-

tion: “Why are there any queues at all?” The Lean Approach, as we shall

see, is even simpler in its interpretation. Backlogs are waste, so we need to

diagnose their cause and eliminate them. Clearly this is a tall order, but we

introduce this somewhat radical idea here because it is a natural outcome

of adopting an OM and, specifically, a Lean orientation toward this common

phenomenon.

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