Making IT Lean

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

patches to visualize how they operate in the same general framework. By

the way, this is no small accomplishment in many IT environments where

disparate teams do work without any coordination with, or even knowledge

of, the work performed by other teams.

In the diagram in Figure4.9, we have depicted each patch management

workflow as being more or less the same, with variations suggested by the

variation in box outlines. These separate VSMs, all depicting the same gen-

eral work of patch management, although flavored differently by the product

or application focus of each team, together comprise a higher-level patch

management process. From the bottom up, we have created an organizi ...