Minimizing and eliminating waste is the central theme of lean manufacturing.
This and a follow up article will address the issue of non-value added work
and suggest ways of minimizing or eliminating it. Non value added work can
arise due to the following factors: over production, motion, waiting, the process itself, inventory, correction, and conveyance.
Over Production
Overproduction is the set of activities that leads to manufacturing products
that do not have a demand. In application maintenance, these can be
translated as: excess of applications and excess of maintenance on those applications.
Excess of Applications: Given the extensively distributed nature of some IT installations, especially in large organizations, there is every possibility of a number of
redundant applications are simply not being switched off. Look closely
at the production tickets/issues that are forthcoming. The first candidates
are those applications on which there are no activities.
To identify applications that are no longer needed, begin with an
application map. The application map is a simple table that lists the
business function (e.g. Payroll), business process, business sub-process,
and the corresponding applications.
First Step: Discover Overlapping Applications : Overlapping applications are those that have significant commonality of
features. Multiple functions supporting a single business
process/sub-process are most probably overlaps.
For the applications that appear to be overlaps:
Second Step: Discover Singleton Applications : Singleton applications service a single critical
link-process or an interface process. In your application map, these appear
only once. The cost of maintaining these applications tends toward extremes, either very negligible, or very high. Singleton applications should be
retired.
Third Step: Discover Redundant Processes and Applications : Redundancies creep into application portfolios typically by acquisitions and
expansion into new geographies, addition of service lines, and in some
cases, the addition of new customer categories.
Redundancies also occur as a
consequence of similar business processes being followed in different units,
and therefore, handled by different applications. Check whether some of the
applications can be consolidated.
Step Four: Discover Stop-Gaps, Roamers, and Chains: Stop-gaps, roamers and chains are applications that usually occur in
large portfolios. They usually soak up more than their share of maintenance
costs and are ideal candidates for consolidation and replacement.
A stop gap is an application that services a sub-process whose
predecessor and successor processes are supported by one application. Gaps, on the other hand, are processes unsupported by any application.
Roamers are applications that appear at random in the
application map. They usually differ in architecture from the rest of the
applications. They tend to consume a higher proportion of maintenance costs.
Chains are a series of sub-processes, each supported by a
different application.
Now that the applications contributing to
inefficiencies in your portfolio have been identified, you can prepare your
roadmap to rationalize your portfolio. Identifying applications that need to
be retired makes it easy to filter out requests pertaining to that
application.
Excess of Maintenance
The major causes for needless and early releases are: poor governance inadequate communication between the maintenance teams and business; inadequate controls on the requesting process; inability of the IT team to establish, communicate and allocate costs to business units; and politics.
Adequate governance on application maintenance is the needed protective
cover under which maintenance teams can function effectively. Governance
must be designed in a manner to ensure that genuine requests are handled in
a smooth and easy manner; while filtering out the needless requests.
Retaining Flexibility while Optimizing Releases : One of the concerns repeatedly mentioned by clients is the fear of loss of
flexibility in moving to a structured model of request prioritization.
However, flexibility needed for a business usually occurs within a narrow
time-window. You can schedule adequate effort for these time-windows and
empower a few people within those units to break request queues. The other
stakeholders need to be also informed of this calendar and ensure that their
critical requests are not affected.