138 ◾ Making IT Lean: Applying Lean Practices to the Work of IT
that there is now a customer demand signal for it (Where’s that report I’m
supposed to get?). Now the report is being pulled.
Tool: One-Piece Flow (versus Batch)
Related to this concept of pull is the simple notion of processing one piece
of work at a time rather than trying to do components in batches and then
pushing them through the workflow. We call this one-piece flow. An excel-
lent example, again using server builds, is to do one server at a time, from
beginning to end. It often seems counterintuitive that this could be more
efficient than producing in batches and the proof of it must be seen in
practice, but we know that in the Lean manufacturing world this is not an
uncom ...