I recently had the privilege to attend the Lean IT Foundation certification training, provided by Pink Elephant. Pink is a supplier of ITIL and IT Service Management conferences, education and consulting services.
Before going into the training, allow me to make a quick overview of the trip itself and the facility where the course was held.
I flew to Phoenix by Delta airlines. I have to say that traveling during the summer time is less stressful than in the winter. You don't have to worry about flight delays because of a snow storm or bad weather. So my flight was on schedule and it was a very smooth ride back and forth.
The conference center was located within the Fairmont Princess resort in Scottsdale. The resort is huge but conference venue is somewhat smaller than what I got accustomed to with Gartner or the other Pink conference in Vegas. I never thought I'd say this in the middle of the desert in August but the rooms were too cool! Maybe it's a way of keeping the audience awake... It was over 46 degrees Celsius outside while it must have been in the low twenties inside.
Arizona is fascinating. I found there was a lot of open spaces and the towns are widely spread across the desert. Cacti and palm trees are all over the place. You can see many desert bunnies running across the resort. I didn't get to visit much but I'm hoping to go back there with my family someday. You will find pictures of the resort and my trip at the end of this blog.
On to the Lean IT Foundations training...
Lean IT and the Toyota Production System (TPS) has been a hot topic within the IT team at Global Excel. I have to say that it took time for me to see the benefits of applying Lean measures within our group. TPS being more focused on manufacturing, I couldn't see it being applied within a team of IT professionals. After reading the Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker, I understood more about the philosophy and thinking behind Lean principles. Yet, I still had a hard time understanding how to apply these principles within the IT Infrastructure group which I'm responsible for. We tried implementing the One Piece Flow principle within the group without great success and this training allowed me to better understand why:
Lean thinking is all about:
Increasing customer value
Eliminating waste
Management as a facilitator
Involvement of all employees
Continual improvement
By blindly trying to implement One Piece Flow, we defeated the first principle: Increasing customer value. We're yet to identify who really is our client. The customer is at the center of everything when you're in the process of being lean.
Lean means improving our customer's satisfaction by being better connected (Go and See!) to them and by adding value they're expecting of us. It also means adding a strategic value by having a continual improvement process in place with a higher employee involvement and motivation. Last but not least, Lean also means having better financial result by
Eliminating waste
Allowing time for new activities: From optimization of value-add work
Improve the cash flow: A shorter duration between order and delivery
A paradigm shift also needs to happen at the management level. As said above, the manager needs to become more of a facilitator for his team. Offering his help to increase productivity and continual improvement.
On that matter, Pink Elephant recommended watching this video:
Drive-The surprising truth about what motivates us
The training was more focused on the Six-Sigma Lean principles. The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook was highly recommended. I found the tools in the book to be quite useful. We learned to use a SIPOC and Value Stream Mapping to gain a better understanding of a current process and how to make it leaner. There are many similarities in between TPS and Six Sigma. Six Sigma may be a little better adapted to the service industry than TPS but both share common philosophies and thinking.
The workshops proposed in class were useful. They allowed us to apply our newly acquired skills to practice. It was also a great opportunity to network with our peers. We did role playing on the Voice of Customer approach, which ties into the Go And See from TPS. We also did a SIPOC and a Value Stream Map to better understand waste areas.
There was also a whole block on performance measurements which I will surely use in my sphere of expertise. The block on lean meeting management was also quite interesting. It made me realize that I have room for improvement in the organization of my meetings with the team under my responsibility and my fellow managers. I need to be better involved in my team's operations.
Overall, this was an eye opener training. I found it quite motivating and I can't wait to apply my newly acquired skills at my workplace.
So here's my take at this year's MSCLS (Twitter @mscls2012 or #mscls2012).
I have to start by saying how enjoyable the flight with Jet Blue really was. This is a very user friendly airline. Minor details such as no cart are circulating in the aisles. Flight attendants are taking your drink/meal orders then come back with a tray, just like any restaurant. This allows passengers to freely circulate if they need to go to the bathroom or simply standup in the aisle to stretch their legs. They also left nuts/crackers available at all time near the restrooms. They also don't have a business class section. This allows for more legroom. Their aircraft are fairly recent and all seats have free satellite TVs/Radio (XM) and Pay-Per-View movies. Small initiatives but making a big difference in the overall customer experience. Last but not least, they are not charging a penny for the first checked-in bag. I chose to fly out of Burlington to JFK then Seattle. The cost was also cheaper than their competition. From now on, I'm not choosing anything else but Jet Blue. And this is not a sponsored message :-)
I took some time on my own to visit parts of Washington State by driving in and out of Seattle where I saw nice little towns, mountains and rivers. I've been privileged to visit WA on many occasions and I'm still amazed on how beautiful this state is.
On to the conference. Generally speaking, this year's CLS was a great one. The Welcome Reception was held at the Lucky Strike bowling lanes facility. In my opinion, this place is too crowdie and noisy to encourage peering with our fellow attendees. It was better at The Parlor last year. Billiard halls are usually less noisy by nature and I felt it was easier networking with others.
The first day of the Conference was good. I think that the Microsoft Conference Center is a classy meeting facility, although the WiFi access would definitely need some improvements. I have heard many attendees complaining about the slowness and difficulty accessing the internet. Breakfast and meals in general are healthy and good.
The morning started with highly professional talks surrounding the Montréal Canadians new GM during breakfast. Then we learned that that Eric Gales was stepping down from his President role for Microsoft Canada to be replaced by Max Long. Full story here.
The first keynote speaker of the day was bestselling author Steve Johnson on Innovative Environments: Cultivating Innovative Thinking (Why am I hearing the Youtube cat saying "Oh long Johnson" all of a sudden?). This was quite insightful. He covered ideas such as:
The Slow Hunch: Great ideas are not always Eureka moments. Some take more thinking, more time to build, sometime years. Organizations should make room for such progressive thinking to encourage innovation;
The Adjacent Possible: Building on existing ideas and/or technologies. Many of today's great inventions were built on a previous technology. The first newspaper press was inspired by a grape press to extract the juice and make wine. Context is also important; As much as the microwave oven is a good idea, it could not have been invented in the 16th century when there was no electricity
Liquid Networks: This was a very entertaining piece and quite informative. The principle is that you hardly can force people to be creative. They have to be in a proper environment. People tend to be less creative in an formal environment, hence the "liquid network", i.e. networking with different minded people in a casual environment such as a coffee shop or a bar.
Diversity: If you form networks with people working on different kinds of problems, you'll be more likely to discover a new approach to your own problems in your own field.
The second speaker of the morning was Doug Kennedy, Vice President, Microsoft Dynamics & Existing Customer Service Programs, discussing Microsoft Business Solutions. It was nice to see the integration in between the different platforms but it really was nothing new to me. Being a technologist myself, I would've appreciated a little more in-depth view of the products.
After lunch, Steven Martin, GM Business Planning Development, Azure, came to share his Perspective on Cloud Computing and Customer Adoption. To me this was more of a marketing speech on the cloud services offered by Microsoft. Nothing really new was said.
We then had a choice of breakout sessions. My first choice was Unlocking ROI through Innovation. This session looked very promising but unfortunately, the room was full by the time I got there. I ended up attending Agile Solution Development - Delivering Business Value Back to the Enterprise, which, at first, was very promising but turned out to be a presentation on how Caterpilar uses MS technologies. The gentleman from CAT was not much of a speaker, compared to MS standards but it was still nice to see that they use many of the Toyota Way principles such as Scrum and Kanban.
The day ended with PJ Hough, Corporate VP, Office Program Management, talking about the Microsoft Office Division. It was amazing to see how much effort MS puts in the user behaviors to learn about their working habits. The most impressive way of learning how information workers are using office is by studying the user's eyes movements on the Office displays, captured by cameras place in front of the users. Clearly, MS doesn't spare any expense on the continuous improvement of their Office suite.
An evening event followed the conference but I couldn't attend as I was feeling a little under the weather.
The following day starting off by a word from Staci Trackey Meagher, Sales VP followed by a great, and I stress great! presentation on Windows 8 and the Consumerization of IT with Rich Reynolds, Chief Strategy & Marketing Officer (CSMO ?), Enterprise Segment of Microsoft Corporation. Staci reported that many attendees wished to have a better hands-on view by the presentators. I can definitely say that Mr. Reynolds was up to the challenge. He presented the benefits of the Metro interface and how it can help improve our productivity. Windows 8 brings the tablet to a whole new level; I think this will be the real business tablet information workers have been waiting for. With a full integration with AD and corporate GPOs, this tablet also has full OS and Office capabilities. By using the same interface for the Windows Phone, the PC and the XBox, Microsoft opens the door to a brand new world of mobility opportunities. I have tweeted in this session that I wanted a Win8 tablet asap. Boss, are you reading this? Traci also shared this video with the audience:
Then followed some breakout sessions. I chose to go to the Future of Communication & the Evolution of Voice with Giovanni Mezgec, GM Unified Communications. I should've gone to another session. As much as this was a good presentation, I have not heard anything new since I'm so deeply involved with this initiative at work.
The next session was Delivering the Next Generation of Productivity with Office 365 by Eric Swift, GM, Worldwide Productivity Sales (quite of a presumptuous title). Yet another good presentation. Still I wonder if there will ever be a fit for Office 365 for Global Excel. We have a well managed infrastructure and by leveraging SCCM, we avoid some of the pitfalls of having a multi versions of Office within our user community. Besides, many of the Office features are tightly integrated with our ERP that I wonder if may create more problems than solve some by using Office 365. It also raises some concerns about privacy (Patriot Act?) for Canadian users. This video was presented to show the size of the MS datacenters:
Next was Consumerization of IT: Changing the Game for desktop computing, with Scott Jackson, Sr. Director, WW Desktop and Devices (more of a humble title than the previous speaker). After this presentation, I felt GEM may be falling behind on embracing personal devices on this post-pc era that has started. As much as I agree with tightening our security policies, I still have to wonder if we're not missing a piece of the equation by ignoring a BYOD policy. Many of my fellow attendees either currently have a policy or will be implementing one.
Last presentation was a Keynote on Microsoft Research: Turning Ideas into Reality with Dr. Rick Rashid, Chief Research Officer. This was a tantalizing presentation. Dr. Rashid IS an awesome speaker. We started by learning that Microsoft employs more PhD than any of their competitors. They also have established partnerships with many of the most prestigious universities worldwide. We have learned a little more on the research behind the Kinect, AKA project Natal. Here's the presented video:
A overview of how Microsoft manages huge volumes of data was presented with the project Fetch Climate. This was also quite interesting. More details can be found here.
Dr. Rashid also explained some of the technology behind the product annouced in this ad (love the dad's face at the end of the clip)
This presentation ended the Summit on a very good note. I hope Dr. Rashid will be back next year.
Microsoft proposed another great networking opportunity by inviting the guests to the Novelty Hill/Januik Winery. Of course, I can never turned a wine tasting opportunity so I went even though I was leaving on a very early flight the morning after. I really enjoyed the event. The previous years, the event used to end right after the last presentation and guests were left on their own. This was another great idea from the organizers. I got to meet with many of my peers and had a great talk with the guys from Orckestra. Great young entrepreneurs they are!
My flight back home was as smooth as my flight to Seattle, got home early and recuperated from the 3 hour jet lag. Here are also a few pictures from this trip.
