Abstract: Lean and Six Sigma methodologies have spread across oceans and industries, originating in Japan with the Toyota Production System. For decades, Toyota's process improvement and defect-reduction efforts were studied and reproduced by other manufacturing giants with varying degrees of success, depending on how closely they followed the Toyota method. Only in recent years have other industries, such as healthcare and IT, been able to deviate from the original Lean framework and still create a Lean culture with the benefits of continuous process improvement. In this session, I'll share my background as a performance improvement coordinator on the front lines of implementing Lean and Six Sigma in the operating rooms of a major academic medical center, and my experiences in flexing and adapting the original Japanese concepts to the more-irregular "manufacturing" of patient care. After shifting my career focus to higher education, I've found even more portability in the culture of Lean, and important lessons that IT professionals can utilize in conjunction with familiar frameworks such as ITIL and Agile. Topics will include: the Japanese concepts of muda and mura as they relate to the IT value stream, what value means to the higher ed customer, kaizen ("rapid improvement") in solution architecture and testing, A3 visual project tracking, front-line employee empowerment in continual improvement, and the ways leadership can support Lean culture.
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-09-11
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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