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Showing posts from February, 2016

The 5 Principles of Lean Thinking

Value Lean starts with a defining value precisely from the perspective of the customer in the relationship to the features and characteristics of the organization’s product (goods or services) and other critical attributes. Value Stream A value stream contains all of the activities required to create customer value for a service product or family of products. This would include all of the processes needed from designing the product, building, testing, releasing and deploying it into the live environment, being able to support the use of the product by your customer and finally being able to improve it to meet the customers changing requirements over the lifetime of the product. Lean organizations wisely distinguish their value streams and arrange their operations to maximize the value created for the customer and minimize the waste in these processes. Flow and Pull Make the remaining value–creating steps flow. Lean organizations will seek to maximize the flow of materials, resource...

Value Elements

When discussing the elements of value creation through the delivery of services we always talk about customer preferences, perceptions and the business outcomes they generate.  We also throw in the elements of utility and warranty.  These are all critical in ensuring our ability to create value for our customers and capture value for ourselves as service providers. The service relationship between service providers and their customers revolves around the use of and interaction of assets.   Assets are made up of both resources and capabilities and are provided by both the service provider and the customer.  These are critical value elements in the creation of usable, customer aligned services. Many of our customers utilize our services in conjunction with their own assets to then build and deliver services or products our customers then deliver to their customers. We, as the service provider, consider these customer assets.  Without these there woul...

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where software is always in a releasable state.   Teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.  By relying on automated testing and deployment, as well as ensuring collaboration and communication between development and operational teams (DevOps), the goal of building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently can be achieved. This approach can help to reduce the cost, time and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications and configuration items (CIs) into production.  A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery and will be critical for operational processes such as Change Management and Release and Deployment Management to be agile and robust in the DevOps environments where continuous delivery will be part of best practices.   Continuous Deliv...

Desktop as a Service

In today’s world of DevOps, development, deployment, operations and support are being done at lightning speed compared to methodologies employed just several years ago. With the implementation of “Infrastructure as Code” (IAC), a type of IT infrastructure, development and operations teams can automatically manage and provision through code rather than using a manual process.  A part of this movement includes, “Desktop as a Service” (DaaS) which is a cloud service where the back-end of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is hosted by a cloud service provider. The service is purchased on a subscription basis. In the DaaS delivery model, the service provider manages the back-end responsibilities of data security storage,   backup, and upgrades. DaaS has a   multi-tenancy   architecture which means a single instance of a software application can serve multiple customers at one time. Each customer is called a tenant. Tenants may be given the ability to custom...