Article at a glance:

Applying lean to application development and maintenance

• Lean techniques, originally developed to reduce waste in manufacturing, are boosting performance in more and more service environments.
• Application development and maintenance—the part of IT that works closely with the business to develop software services—is a good candidate for lean. Many processes around software development are poorly organized, resulting in rework, unbalanced workloads, and other forms of waste that harm both productivity and morale.
• The transformation to lean requires companies to identify and measure the main sources of waste and define opportunities to reduce it.
• Lean, like any major transformation, demands a sustained leadership commitment and a thoughtful approach to introducing and rolling out change.