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Categories: events
Dr Yoram Bosc-Haddard, Senior VP at Capgemini, spoke at Conference: Zero last month about introducing Lean ways of working to the company. His role was to transfer the way the company works and to shift behaviours – no mean feat in a company that has grown rapidly (especially in India) since 2009.
The project team focused on moving behaviours moving from a command and control style of management to a culture of leadership and support. “It’s impossible in IT services to design from the top because things change so rapidly,” Yoram said. “We wanted to create a culture of problem solving instead of waiting for the boss to do it.”
Four years later, the team have formulated standards, and adopted a gradual implementation of what they call the Capgemini Lean Foundation supported by digital distributed delivery tools. They haven’t made any particular maturity levels compulsory, but Yoram said that what is compulsory is to start and to progress continuously, so the culture of continuous improvement is embedded.
Measuring change
The project team has a maturity dashboard which is updated every two months and is now starting to become the standard way of assessing maturing in the company. Yoram shared a snapshot of it from September which was difficult to read as the resolution wasn’t that great (perhaps that was deliberate), but he pointed out that they take an honest approach and that not everything is green.
Being able to quantify or demonstrate the benefits is, as Yoram said, a standard question of any transformation programme, but even more so with Lean “because it is Lean”. This, he explained, was one of the key challenges.
The company and team agreed that there was no mathematical business case for this change. “But you can connect and measure the investment, measuring behavioural change and operational change,” Yoram said. They measured the quality of problem solving, technical issues, throughput, operational KPIs and how the team managed to share resources. “This was the way we justified the business case and have managed to so ongoing,” he said.
“People were seeing Lean as something we to do bottom up and there was a natural tendency to reinvent all the time because all our clients are a little bit different.” He wanted to adopt standards where they could be adopted to avoid this rework and to increase maturity. This was done through the Capgemini Lean Foundation. This starts with the customer and builds through a daily standing up meeting, operational KPIs, standardisation, continuous improvement, visual management, leadership engagement, skills management, and flow management.
“Very often people are promoted because of their technical skill and not their managerial skills,” Yoram said. “This foundation equips them with a way of working that is suitable for the new world, and distributed teams.” They also put in place a quarterly feedback loop. Finally, the team also made sure that the developers of the tools in use for digital distributed delivery were the first users. This meant instant feedback from people who had actually built them and that bugs could be ironed out before the tools were deployed to other customers.
Yoram said that they had a lot of political, technical and emotional trouble along the way. “The success recipe was purpose and agility,” he explained. They stuck with the purpose of equipping people to do problem solving and not just firefighting. With this goal in mind it became clear that the cultural change was achievable and that behaviours would slowly shift to the ‘new world’.
This year Yoram and his team want to move the management of change from ‘business as unusual’ to business as usual. By this he means that the project should simply evolve into the way that change is done. It’s a new company culture, rather than an event. They are also moving it from “proof of concept to return on investment” and focusing on making the tools involved production systems; the way they do business. With their track record, I’m sure they’ll achieve this.
Posted on: November 13, 2013 04:37 AM |
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